


Marlboro Man

by gutsforgarters



Series: Marlboro Man [1]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cunnilingus, Demisexuality, Developing Relationship, Dom/sub, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Face-Sitting, Femdom, First Time, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Domestic Violence, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Older Man/Younger Woman, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Post-Season/Series 03, Praise Kink, Shotgunning, Smoking, Smut, Sneaking Around, Switching, Unsafe Sex, gently dismantling toxic masculinity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2020-02-13
Packaged: 2020-09-27 22:20:02
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 34,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20415220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gutsforgarters/pseuds/gutsforgarters
Summary: Daryl has his habits, although he never anticipated that he’d come to count Beth Greene among their number. And he’s got no idea what either of them are doing, but one thing’s for damn sure: the world’s sweetest nicotine rush ain’t got nothing on his girl.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alamorn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alamorn/gifts).

> Deeply dismayed that there isn't a "Gently Dismantling Toxic Masculinity" tag, because if I had to assign an overarching Point to this fic, that would be it. 
> 
> To preemptively clear up any potential confusion: the main action of this fic is set in the prison post-Season 3, but Chapter 1 takes place during Season 2. I refuse to call it a prologue. I just need to set up some THEMES, okay? 
> 
> Lovingly if somewhat angrily dedicated to the people who enabled me when I tentatively expressed my desire to write Bethyl femdom. This one's on you folks.
> 
> [The unofficial soundtrack](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4PeKnh4hql5FqdBiLRLGGo?si=w_d4dWtGR4mKFbfxbAXPxw).

“The hell you doin’ out here?”

Beth’s shoulders pull into a guilty slouch, but she doesn’t startle, and she doesn’t cry out. She didn’t hear his approach, but her scalp’s been prickling with the weight of unseen attention for going on five minutes now, and the only question she thought to ask herself was whether she was being stalked by the living or the dead. Now that she has her answer, she pivots, putting her back to the empty barn and her front to the person who’s intruded on her private wake. 

Daryl Dixon’s standing not a yard away from her, and it bothers Beth that he got this close without her noticing until he _wanted_ her to notice, but he’s a hunter, just like Otis—_was_, just like Otis _was_—so if he can sneak up on a deer, it stands to reason that he could sneak up on _her_.

He’s wearing the habitual ornery scowl that she’s only ever really seen from a distance, but his crossbow’s missing. Something silver flashes between his fingers and sparks in the hazy sunlight, too small to be a knife. A lighter?

Doesn’t matter. What matters is, less than a week ago, she would’ve skittered away from him and that scowl the second they crossed her path, mumbling excuses about needing to help Maggie and Patricia out with dinner prep. But now? Now, she twists _her _face into a scowl that’s probably a lot less impressive than his and retorts, “It’s_ my_ family’s land. I can go wherever the _hell_ I want on it.”

Daryl slams his tongue against the backs of his teeth, which Beth condescends to interpret as an acknowledgement of her point. Her moment of triumph is short lived, however, because in the next second, Daryl’s in motion. Beth’s shoulders pull up even higher until they’re practically level with her ears, but Daryl doesn’t get in her face like she was half expecting him to. He just walks past her, giving her a wider berth than even considerations of personal space call for, and she turns to watch him slump against the side of the barn and fold his burly arms over his chest. 

Beth tugs her cardigan’s sleeves farther down her wrists and crosses her arms, too. It’s not that she wants to be out here with him while he silently judges her for loitering in front of an open, empty grave, but she can’t think up a better alternative for what to do with her time, so she says, “What about you? What’re _you_ doin’ out here?” She points her chin at his lighter. “Takin’ a smoke break?”

Daryl flips the lighter open. Snaps it back shut. His knuckles are crusted over with fresh scabs. “Yeah, sure. Figured I could use one after poundin’ that college kid’s face into the goddamn dirt.”

Most of what Beth feels these days is filtered through a thick fog of apathy, but now she registers an unexpectedly potent bolt of surprise, because he didn’t tell her to fuck off when she’d anticipated the contrary. Of course, his voice was laced with the sort of irony that invited her to read between the lines; he probably _was_ indirectly telling her to fuck off.

Beth tucks her left thumb into her sleeve and stretches the woven fabric out around her nail, tempting the threads to snap. “Doesn’t it bother you?”

Daryl’s pale, squinty eyes get squintier. If he hasn’t outright told her to take a long walk off a short pier just yet, he looks well on his way to doing so. “The hell you talkin’ ’bout now?”

Beth’s got a feeling that Daryl knows exactly what she’s talking about—and she doesn’t buy the _dumb redneck_ persona for one goddamn second—but since he asked, she says the words anyway. “That they’re makin’ you do this. Gettin’ information outta that Randall guy, I mean. Did they even consider anybody else, or did they just assume you’d be alright with it?” Mr. Grimes and Mr. Walsh were police officers before everything ended, right? Shouldn’t this sort of thing be under _their_ jurisdiction?

Daryl tosses the lighter two feet in the air, then catches it deftly without looking at it, or her. “Maybe I volunteered. Y’ever think of that?”

If Maggie were here, she’d call Daryl out on his bullshit. Of course, if Maggie were here, Beth wouldn’t be speaking to Daryl at all, not if her big sister had anything to say about it. “Nobody_ volunteers_ for somethin’ like this. Not unless they’re a sadist, anyway.”

For the first time, the corner of Daryl’s mouth ticks into a half smile. It is by no means a happy expression. “How you know I ain’t one?”

That’s a fair point. Beth drags the toe of her boot through the dry grass and shrugs. “Guess I don’t.” Her bandages are itching, and she tamps down the urge to scratch them raw and bloody. “What’re you _really _doin’ out here, Mr. Dixon, huh? And don’t tell me it ain’t my business; I already told _you_ it’s my family’s land, so that makes it my business.”

The half not-a-smile curves into another scowl, fiercer even than the last. “Christ, girl, can’t you just leave me the hell alone?”

Beth deduces there and then that Daryl Dixon can’t have any younger siblings; if he did, he’d recognize the futility of his request. “Tell me what you’re doin’ out here and I will.” Maybe. If she judges his answer satisfactory, and if she feels like going.

Daryl flips the lighter open again, but this time, he twirls the wheel until a flame catches. He holds the lighter up to his face, too close, close enough to burn the hair right off his blunt chin, and watches the tame fire waver in the weak, humid breeze.

“Was thinkin’ of burnin’ the place down,” he says, and when he finally looks away from the lighter and back to Beth, his eyes are hot with challenge. _What you gonna do about it?_ he seems to be asking. _You gonna run away and cry to your daddy?_

If he anticipated that she would cry or yell at him, though, he’s in for a mighty disappointment. Beth looks at the empty husk of the old barn and nods, once. “I wouldn’t stop you.”

When Beth looks away from the barn and back at Daryl, she finds that she can’t interpret his expression, mostly because she doesn’t know him well enough to try. He clips the lighter shut and sticks it in his jeans’ pocket but doesn’t pull his hand back out.

“Ran outta smokes, anyways,” he mumbles, and that seems to be the end of that. Beth kind of expected him to reiterate his demand that she explain what she was doing out here, especially since _she_ dragged an answer out of _him_—it’s only fair, right?—but maybe he’d prefer that the conversation just die. Yeah, he probably would.

Anyway, Beth’s chewing something over—_literally_ chewing it over with her thumbnail fastened between her teeth. Then, before she’s even concluded that this is what she really wants to do, she releases her thumb and says, “Wait right here, okay?”

Beth still can’t put a sure name to the look on Daryl’s face, but she’d venture to categorize it as _regret_—regret that he ever spoke to her in the first damn instance. “The hell’re you—”

She’s already retreating without looking where she’s going, and she nearly trips backwards over a rock. “Just don’t go anywhere, alright? I’ll be right back.”

Afraid that he’ll disappear the second she turns her back to him but not wanting to waste any more time, Beth spins on her heel and races towards the house, stumbling several times on the uneven ground but refusing to stop or slow, clinging to this weird rush of motivation with both hands, knowing she’s being silly but not particularly caring because at least it’s _something_. At least she _cares_.

There’s no one on the porch or in the house—they’re probably off deciding what to do with Randall—which is good for Beth, because she doubts that she could explain herself even if she _wanted _to. She doesn’t encounter anyone on the way back, either, except for a small distant blot that might be Carl. And Beth grew up with a whole spread of farmland for a playground, but she’s been sedentary enough lately that she’s pretty out of shape, and there’s a stitch sawing in her side by the time she gets back to the barn.

The barn, in front of which stands a grand total of _no one_.

Oh. Well, that figures.

Beth shouldn’t be this disappointed. She doesn’t know Daryl Dixon and she doesn’t particularly _like_ him, but he’s the only person she’s talked to since she tried to kill herself who doesn’t look at her like she’s a ticking time bomb, or worse, like she’s some tragic little girl who requires extensive babying lest she steal another steak knife (_Andrea_ probably wouldn’t look at her like that, except Maggie won’t let Andrea anywhere near Beth anymore). Even _Jimmy _won’t look her in the eye when he talks to her, and the last time he stammered his way through an awkward hello, Beth nearly started screaming at him.

She lingers in front of the barn, struggling to catch her breath, and then struggling to suppress the toxic well of disappointment. Whatever. Talking to Daryl was weirdly refreshing, but she’s not gonna let this get to her. Not when she’s already survived worse.

At a loss for what else to do, Beth shuffles into the barn, nose wrinkling at the concentrated smell of rot. It’s not as bad as it was, at least, on account of Daddy’s been airing the place out. As if by dispelling the sickly-sweet stink, he could somehow dispel his mistakes, too. As if there’s any hope at all of laying _these _ghosts to rest.

Beth’s breath catches, and she has to squeeze her eyes shut to keep from crying. No. _No_.

But a scuffling noise has her eyes flying open only a second after she closed them. Scalp prickling like it had earlier, Beth turns and looks up towards the hayloft—and, _there_. Two filthy boots dangling over the side, right above her head.

He didn’t leave, after all. He did what she asked—what she _demanded,_ if you wanna get technical about it. That’s more surprising than his perceived absence. She _hoped_ that he’d stay, but she didn’t actually expect that he _would_.

Beth sticks her prize in her pocket and climbs the ancient ladder to the hayloft, rungs shaking beneath her boots with every step. It’d be real fucked up, she reflects grimly, if she decided that she didn’t actually wanna die only to fall and break her neck a few days later.

But she doesn’t break her neck. She makes it all the way up to the hayloft and sits down roughly two feet away from Daryl, legs dangling over the edge same as his. She digs the pack of Marlboro Reds out of her pocket and offers it to him mutely, and his eyes bug like she just handed him a sack of gold.

Not that gold’s worth anything anymore, come to think of it.

“They’re Maggie’s,” Beth explains when Daryl fails to immediately snatch them up. “I mean, they _were_. She took up smokin’ while she was away at college, but it didn’t really stick.” Maggie told her that she hated the stink of tobacco too much for it to be worth the nicotine rush.

Daryl finally takes the pack of Marlboros, fingers decidedly _not_ brushing Beth’s in a way that feels deliberate. He shakes a cigarette out of the pack but doesn’t light it. “Ain’t gonna lecture me about lung cancer?”

She probably would have, once. At the very least, she would’ve complained about the smell, but she’ll take tobacco over rotting flesh. “Doesn’t really matter anymore, does it?”

Daryl snorts, like it’s the closest he can get to laughter. “Guess it don’t.” He sticks the cigarette in his mouth and lights up, taking a long drag before turning his face away from Beth’s to exhale. “Thanks.”

Beth swings her feet through the yawning gap between the loft and the floor. If she squinches up her eyes, she can make out the shadows of bloodstains on the ground. “You’re welcome. I mean, it’s not a big deal. Like I said, no one else wanted ’em.”

“Dunno why.” Daryl puckers his lips around the filter, and the cherry flares the same surly red as coals in a fireplace. “This’s the good shit.”

Beth imagines that one brand of cigarette’s much the same as any other, but it’s not like she’s an expert on the subject. “If you say so.”

Daryl flicks a stream of ash over the side of the loft, and if it’s still smoldering a little, if there’s a small chance that the ash will catch fire and light the barn up for real—well, then, _good_. “Why you doin’ this, anyways?”

Beth tips her head back and inhales even though she knows better, but up here, the smell’s not so bad, more rotted hay than rotted flesh. “Doin’ what?”

The cigarette bobs between Daryl’s lips as he talks. “Hangin’ ’round me like this. Ain’t exactly pleasant company. Think ya’d prob’ly get better conversation outta the geeks.”

Instead of asking him why he calls the monsters that used to be people _geeks_, Beth says, “You’re alright.”

Daryl snorts again, and smoke flutters out of his nostrils. “Thanks.”

“I mean.” Grasping for the right words feels a little bit like trying to hold onto a slick river stone when the current’s fighting to drag her downstream. “You don’t look at me like—”

Like she might try and kill herself again if he says or does the wrong thing. Like she’s gonna go catatonic and stay that way. Like she’s a stupid little girl who can’t face reality for what it is.

Sometimes. Sometimes she just wants to yank back her cardigan’s sleeve and shove her stitched-up wrist in everyone’s faces and_ scream _at them to look, _look, is this what you’re so afraid of, is it? I survived this but you’re acting like I didn’t, like I’m dead already, like you’re just counting the days until you have to dig a grave for me, too. _

Beth never finishes her sentence, and Daryl doesn’t press her to the way the others would’ve. Which is just as well. She’s not sure what she might have ended up saying.

Instead of waxing on about her own problems, Beth devotes herself to trying to figure this man out. He’s made it clear that she’s a pain in his ass, yet _he _approached _her_. He’s apparently willing to tolerate her company in exchange for _the good shit._ He’s the kind of man people send to do their dirty work, but he’s also the kind of man who will spend days out in the woods looking for a lost little girl. With a pang, Beth reflects that her momma would probably call him an _enigma_.

Daryl holds the smoldering cigarette between his fingers while he exhales a long stream of smoke, and Beth eyes it speculatively. There’s a damp spot on the filter where he wrapped his lips around it.

“Can I have one’a those?”

Daryl eyeballs her, then pointedly shoves the pack into his pocket and out of her reach. “Nah. Y’gotta ration this shit.”

Feeling a little bit like a kid who’s just been denied the toy they badly wanted, Beth says, “But I’m the one who gave ’em to you!”

“Yeah, you did, and they’re mine now. Ain’t givin’ ‘em back.”

“I’m not askin’ you to _give them back_; I’m askin’ you to _share._”

“An’ I’m tellin’ ya I ain’t_ gonna _share. Christ, girl, you even legal to smoke?”

Beth ticks up her chin and narrows her eyes. “How old were _you_ when you took up smokin’?”

Daryl’s eyes flicker. He takes a long drag off his cigarette, holding the smoke in his lungs for a minute before pushing it back out. “Still ain’t givin’ you none.”

Beth scoots a little closer. “Can I have a hit off’a yours, at least?” she asks, perfectly aware that she’s wheedling. 

“Nah. Ya wouldn’t like it, anyways.”

“_You_ like it.”

“Didn’t like it at first. Nobody does. ’Sides, you’d jus’ hack your damn lungs up an’ bitch at _me_ about it.”

He has a point, but instead of conceding that point and moving on, Beth chooses to say something spectacularly_ stupid_.

“We could shotgun it,” she blurts, and Daryl coughs and swears and fumbles his cigarette, ash scattering across the back of his hand. Not looking at her, he puts the cigarette to his mouth and sucks industriously, ears lighting up redder than the cherry end. Beth, her guts squirming with something fast approaching humiliation and her mind lingering on the harsh line of Daryl's mouth and the imagined push of smoke into her lungs, attempts to salvage what she can. “Um, shotgunning’s when you—” Wait, no. How is that _salvaging_ anything?

“Fuckin’ _Christ_.” Daryl stubs the cigarette out—it’s not even halfway smoked—and flicks it over the side of the loft. So much for_ rationing_ the things. “I know what _shotgunnin’_ is, Jesus. How in the hell d’_you _know about it?”

_Hey_. Just hold on a minute. She may be sheltered, but she’s not_ that_ sheltered. “I’ve seen movies.”

A blue vein stands out in Daryl’s temple, too close to the skin. He still won’t look at her. “The hell kinda movies you been watchin’?”

Beth just shrugs, and Daryl pushes to his feet without another word spared for her. She blinks at the scorch mark his discarded cigarette left on the loft’s floor, then scrambles up and follows after him. Even out of shape, she's fast, but he’s faster, and by the time she bursts outside, he’s already made a good chip in the distance between the barn and his lonely little tent.

“Hey!” Beth says, raising her voice to be heard over the screaming cicadas. The world ends, the dead walk, but cicadas are a constant. “Just wait a second!”

He doesn’t wait, and frustration funnels up Beth’s throat. “I said, _wait a second_!”

Miracle of miracles, he actually stops, shoulders pulling up around his ears, fists clenching tight. He doesn’t turn to look at her, which. Fine. Whatever. Beth pulls her sleeves over her wrists and circles around him, eyes flicking to his face before locking onto the toes of her boots.

He stopped because she asked him to. Because she _told_ him to. It’s a weird feeling, bossing around an adult and actually having that adult_ listen_.

“Look, I’m sorry. I was just kiddin’ around. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable—”

Daryl scoffs, but it sounds forced. “Didn’t make me fuckin’ _uncomfortable_. Jus’ don’t want your daddy gunnin’ for my ass on your goddamn account.”

Beth doesn’t tell him that, between her dad and her sister, _Maggie’s_ the one who’s most likely to point a shotgun at his heart. “Yeah, I know, I just…I’m sorry, okay?”

Daryl doesn’t say anything, and Beth’s throat starts to close up. Great. Just _great_. She finally found someone who doesn’t treat her any different, and she had to go and ruin it. The possibility that she’s chased Daryl off for good ices her over with a kind of panic, and maybe that’s why she ends up answering his earlier question. Like she can somehow persuade him not to leave by sharing something painful.

“I wanted to burn it down, too. That’s. That’s why I was out here. I brought a lighter and everything.” And she drags the plastic Bic lighter out of her pocket and shows it to him, holding it up like an olive branch.

Daryl still doesn’t say anything, and Beth finally looks him in the face. That face is still in a way that suggests he’s struggling to keep anything from showing on it. His skin is slick with perspiration, and he smells like burnt tobacco. Tobacco and sweat and something earthier, something that Beth can’t name but has smelled on men before. It’s stronger on Daryl than she’s used to, though. Possibly because he hasn’t bathed in a while.

And that should gross her out a little, but instead, it gives her a feeling like someone just tugged on an invisible string that’s been hooked to her navel. The feeling dies almost as soon as she notices it, but it still throws her for a loop, gives her a head rush like the kind Maggie described getting when she smoked. 

Daryl’s face finally shifts, and he pulls his bottom lip between his teeth. He shrugs mutely, which Beth supposes is as good an acknowledgement as she’s going to get. Then he twitches his head on his neck, not quite a nod, before stepping around her and heading the way he was going before she made him stop.

Beth turns to watch him, tracing his outline with her eyes and trying to reignite the feeling she got a second ago, mostly because it’s preferable to feeling nothing at all, even if it _does_ unsettle her a little bit. The cicadas sing, and her bandages itch and itch.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's midnight where I live. So, yeah, I'd definitely say that I regret everything about this.

The trapdoor swings open before Beth can get a chance to knock, which means that Daryl must’ve seen her coming from his vantage point at the top of the guard tower. Anyone else might’ve grabbed her hand to help her the rest of the way up the ladder, but Daryl _knows_ that Beth doesn’t need his help, so he’s not going to insult her by offering. When someone needs his help, he gives it. When they don’t, he lets them be. That’s just how Daryl is.

So Beth boosts herself the rest of the way up with a muffled grunt of exertion, folding her legs up after her and sitting back on her haunches. She shakes loose strands of hair out of her eyes and smiles at Daryl, who’s hanging back by the railing. He’s covered in a light layer of sweat that sheens his grimy skin and plasters his hair to his temples. No surprise there. It’s muggy out anyway, and the tower’s a sauna even with the walls and windows blown out. The sheets of corrugated metal they’ve set up as makeshift ramparts help matters not at all, not with the way they trap heat. 

“Howdy,” Beth says, shutting the trapdoor behind her and pushing to her feet with a bounce.

Daryl nods cursorily, lowering his crossbow so it’s pointed at the floor instead of Beth’s belly. “Hey. What you want?”

He’s not _trying_ to be rude, even if his word choice speaks to the contrary. Another thing about Daryl is that he likes to get straight to the point, and Beth’s learned not to take it personally. 

“I got somethin’ for you,” Beth informs him, sliding her hand into her pocket. “But if you want it, you gotta say _please_.”

Daryl looks mortally insulted by the very suggestion. “How the hell’m I s’posed to know whether I want the damn thing or not if I ain’t even seen it yet?”

_Now_ he’s being rude, but if Beth scolded him for it, he’d inform her that it’s what she gets for being a royal pain in his ass. She knows that for certain, because they’ve had this conversation before. So instead of trying to brainstorm a witty rejoinder, she simply pulls the pack of Marlboros out of her pocket and wriggles it pointedly.

Daryl’s eyes flare almost cartoonishly wide, and that’s all the warning Beth gets before he’s lurching forward to grab the Marlboros. Fortunately for her and unfortunately for him, she has the advantage of not being weighed down by an unwieldy crossbow, so avoiding his grasping hand is simply a matter of stepping nimbly out of reach and sticking her arm out over the side of the guard tower, Marlboros poised to go tumbling down into the no-man’s land outside the fences. Daryl freezes in place with one foot in front of the other, jaw tight, hand outstretched in an aborted swipe.

“Uh-uh.” Beth shifts the pack so it’s sandwiched precariously between her two longest fingers. If he rushes at her and she startles, it’ll fall whether she wants it to or not. She can see that Daryl sees that. “Say _please_.”

Daryl lowers his hand, but Beth can tell that he’s assessing her, trying to strategize a way of getting the Marlboros without having to ask nicely. He could overpower her, easy, but he clearly doesn’t want to risk the cigarettes. “The fuck, girl? I ain’t some dog ya need to fuckin’ house train.”

“Nah,” Beth drawls, voice as cloyingly sweet as fresh maple syrup. “Just a mean redneck who needs to be taught some good southern manners.”

Daryl looks like he wants to tell her what she can do with her good southern manners, and she knows, if it came down to it and she _did_ drop the pack, that he would just venture beyond the fences to retrieve it, because he’s _like that_. And Beth doesn’t want Daryl risking his life over a pack of goddamn cigarettes, which means she’ll have to hand them over anyway if he holds out on asking nicely much longer.

Really, it all comes down to how willing he is to indulge her whims.

And, in the end, it turns out he’s willing _enough_.

“Christ, girl.” Daryl’s shoulders slump fractionally, and he curls his fingers against his palm to gesture her forward. “Just gimme the damn things.” Beth sticks her chin out mutinously, and Daryl rolls his eyes so hard his pupils and irises all but disappear into his sockets. “_Please_, goddammit. You fuckin’ happy?”

“Sure am,” Beth says, and eases cautiously forward to slap the pack into Daryl’s waiting palm. He immediately pulls it out of her reach, as if she’d have half a chance against him in a scuffle. It’s almost flattering, really.

“Pain in my ass,” Daryl grouches, stuffing the Marlboros into his pocket and coming over to Beth’s side of the tower. He shuffles one of the metal sheets aside and plunks down on the ledge, legs dangling like a kid on a swing, crossbow within easy reach. He unearths the pack and his lighter and gets to work, and after taking a long pull that he eventually exhales in a slow stream of smoke, he tilts his head to squint up at Beth. “Where the hell you get these, anyways?”

Beth sits down next to him, much closer than she would have before a long winter on the run forced them all into unasked-for intimacy. She thinks she can see something moving through the trees, gait too stilted to be human, but if Daryl’s not especially concerned about it, then neither is she.

“Y’know that supply run Glenn and Maggie just got back from?” she asks. Daryl grunts an acknowledgement, so she nods and says, “Well, they found these, but neither of ’em are smokers, so I offered to come bring ’em to you.”

“Lucky me,” says Daryl, and when Beth smirks at him, he retaliates by blowing smoke in her face. She near about coughs up a lung, eyes watering so bad they burn.

“_Jackass_,” she says once she’s caught her breath, and it’s Daryl’s turn to smirk.

The walker in the woods stumbles past the tree line, and Daryl hooks one hand over the railing and leans forward, squinting at it as it makes ungainly but steady progress toward the stretch of fence nearest the guard tower, almost tripping twice on its long skirt. Its hair used to be blonde. Like Beth’s.

“You gonna shoot it?” Beth asks quietly, and Daryl shakes his head.

“Nah. Waste of an arrow.” He lets go of the railing, leans back, and exhales smoke through his nostrils. “I’ll take care of it if it starts makin’ too much noise. Don’t want its buddies showin’ up for the party.” 

Yeah, they really don’t. They’ve reclaimed the fenced fields surrounding the prison since the Governor’s final attack, and the last thing they need is enough walkers piling up to tip those fences over and bump them back down to square one. But if Daryl thinks it’s not a problem just yet, Beth trusts his judgment. He was a survivor long before the rest of them were forced to live in a world where stepping outside of fortified walls means gambling your own life.

Beth drums her heels gently against the tower’s outer wall, then says, real casual, “You’ve been takin’ watch a lot lately.”

Daryl taps a short column of ash off the end of his cigarette, and the little gray particles float lazily away on the weak, humid breeze. “The hell you mean? Ain’t doin’ nothin’ different than I used to.”

“No, you ain’t, and that’s the problem.” Daryl turns his head and looks at her like she just started speaking in tongues, and Beth rolls her eyes. “We got more people now. A lot more people. You don’t need to take watch as often as you used to, anymore.”

Instead of answering the implicit question, Daryl occupies himself with sucking down a lungful of smoke—an obvious avoidant tactic—and Beth’s about to snatch the cigarette out of his hand when he finally lowers it, exhales, and says, “None of ’em know what the hell they’re doin’.”

“Some of them do, and the rest won’t ever learn if we don’t give ’em a chance to try.” Daryl says nothing, and Beth takes a deep, tobacco-tinged breath, trying to think of a way to say this that won’t piss him off. Upon concluding that _all ways_ of saying it will probably piss him off, she goes for broke. “I’m not used to bein’ around so many people, either. It was just us for the longest time, and I never really liked crowds, anyway—”

“The fuck?” And, yup, he’s pissed. There was a time when pissed-off Daryl would’ve scared the bejeezus out of her, but he’s her friend now. Her family. If it weren’t for him, she’d probably be dead ten times over. “You tryna say I’m_ scared_ of ’em or some shit? Like I’m some kinda pussy?”

It’s lucky for Daryl that Beth’s a patient person. “No, I’m not. I’m sayin’ you’re an introvert, like me, and that even if you _weren’t_, you’re still used to it just bein’ us and the rest of our family. And I’m not sayin’ that we should’ve turned these people away or anything, and I’m not sayin’ I resent them, but sometimes I wish.” Beth ducks her head, heavy ponytail slithering across the nape of her neck like a snake. “Sometimes I wish it was just us again, y’know? Does that make me a bad person?”

Daryl surprises her by answering immediately. “Nah. An’ if it does, guess that makes me a shitty person, too.” When Beth looks up at him, he’s not exactly smiling, but his expression has lightened somewhat.

Something in Beth eases like a loosening fist to hear him say that. It’s nice, knowing that someone feels the exact same way you do. Especially when you’ve been too chickenshit to express the sentiment in question to the rest of your family.

Letting the Woodbury folks stay with them was the right call, and Beth had been upset enough to cry when Rick initially turned Tyreese’s group away. They’re building a _community_ now. That’s a good thing. You need to be part of a community if you’re gonna live and not just survive.

Still. Beth never was very good around new people, and that personality trait has only exaggerated itself since the world became a whole lot quieter and a whole lot emptier.

So, yeah. It’s nice that Daryl gets it, and she’s not _surprised_ that he gets it. Of all the people in their family, Beth expected him to be able to relate the most.

“You ain’t a bad person.” Beth watches the blonde walker hurl itself against the fence and cling with two clumsy, rotted hands. “Neither am I. We’re just…shy.”

“Ain’t shy,” Daryl grumbles around his cigarette, but the tips of his ears light up red, contradicting his denial. Seeing that, Beth can’t resist teasing him a little.

“Oh, yeah? You practically ran away from me the first time we ever spoke. What d’you call _that_?”

Daryl plucks the cigarette out of his mouth and points the smoldering end at Beth. She doesn’t flinch because she knows he’s not going to hurt her, but she still makes a face when some of the ash scatters across her jeans—as if it matters, as if they aren’t already badly in need of washing.

“I didn’t fuckin’ _run away_. You was pissin’ me the hell off, so I _walked_ the hell away 'fore I started yellin’. Didn’t want you cryin’ to your folks and rainin’ hell down on my sorry ass.”

Beth firms the set of her chin even as she absently dusts ash off her jeans. “You know me, Daryl. You know I ain’t the kinda girl to go cryin’ to my daddy.” Not since she was a little girl, at least, but that’s beside the point, okay.

Daryl slams his tongue against the backs of his teeth, which, Beth has learned, really _does_ mean that he’s conceded her point but doesn’t want to admit as much out loud. “Didn’t know you back then,” he says, turning away from her to face front again. “Didn’t know _what_ the hell you’d do.”

“That’s fair, I guess,” Beth allows, and Daryl snorts. They subside into a companionable silence that doesn’t break until after Daryl’s finished his cigarette. He stubs it out and flicks it over the side of the tower—_littering_, Beth thinks, as if it matters anymore—then goes fishing for a second one.

“It’s a chain smoking kinda day, huh?” Beth asks as Daryl shelters his cigarette with a cupped palm and lights up.

“Ain’t got no other way of copin’ with your annoyin’ ass,” Daryl mumbles around his cigarette, and Beth starts to smile. She does that a lot around Daryl, a fact that seems to confuse him. He turns his head and catches her smiling, and his eyes narrow to slits. “Wipe that goddamn grin off your face.” 

“Nah,” Beth says cheerfully, and Daryl snorts and nudges her lightly with his shoulder, more playful than irritated. Beth’s heart flip flops, and her smile shrinks, turns shy. She thinks of the first time they sat together while Daryl smoked—she didn’t really like him back then, but she does now. Maybe likes him a little _too_ much.

And she’s guaranteed to regret this, but the little girl part of her that’s always hoping for _something_ to spark between her and Daryl mutinies, takes over her brain and her tongue and makes her say, “Was just thinkin’ ‘bout _why _you ran away from me the first time we ever spoke.”

Beth can feel herself blushing, but a stolen glance from the corner of her eye proves that Daryl’s blushing even _harder_, and that makes her feel a little better. “Already told you, girl, I didn’t fuckin’ _run away_ from nothin’.”

Beth distracts herself from the hard beat of her pulse in her wrists by focusing on the fence clinger, and it says a lot about the situation she’s gotten herself into that looking at something that wants to eat her actually _calms her down_. It’s finally seen them, or smelled them, and it’s snarling up at the guard tower. Beth sticks her tongue out at it for a second before rolling it back into her mouth. Thinks of tongues, of Daryl’s tongue in particular, of how it would taste like tobacco if he kissed her right now. She fiddles with her ponytail and thinks, _So much for calming down._

And the same mutinous part of her from earlier rides the giddy high she gets from thinking of Daryl Dixon’s tongue on her and in her and says, “Don’t suppose you’d shotgun that cigarette with me if I asked now, huh?”

Daryl coughs, not as hard as the last time she asked him to shotgun a cigarette with her, not like he’s gonna hack up a whole lung. But his voice still sounds wrecked—from the smoke, it’s gotta be the smoke—when he says, “Quit messin’ around, girl. Don’t got the time to play your dumbass games.”

Beth’s face feels positively _seared_, like she fell asleep in the sun and woke up with third-degree burns, but she’s knee deep in shit anyway so she might as well keep wading. “I ain’t _messin’ around_. I really wanna try it, and the only way I can think of doin’ it that doesn’t end with me hackin’ up a lung is if you help, but if you don’t wanna, I’ll—”

“You’ll fuckin’ what?” Daryl’s harsh tone brings Beth’s eyes back to his face, and, no, she still can’t read what’s in it. Whatever it is, it half makes her want to shrink away and half want to climb into his lap and ride his dick through his jeans. “Ask somebody else? Some dumb fuck from Woodbury? Don’t you start that shit with me, girl. Ain’t about to get blackmailed by no goddamn kid.”

Actually, what she was going to say was, _I’ll drop it for good this time_. But he’s starting to piss her off, so she says quietly, fiercely, “I ain’t a _kid_—and you damn well_ know_ that, Daryl Dixon.”

The cigarette smolders between Daryl’s knuckles, and Beth wonders how long he’s going to leave it unattended for. If he’d let it burn down to his skin. “Yeah,” he says, voice scraped raw with smoke and something else, something that makes Beth’s scalp tingle with goosebumps. “Bet them Woodbury assholes know it, too.”

Beth’s heart closes into a fist and knocks on her ribs, brain spinning in circles. She wants to write what Daryl said off as standard protectiveness—she’s the youngest woman in their group, not a kid but still more vulnerable than the real, grown adults, so of course her family members are gonna be wary about the new men from Woodbury and their possible intentions towards her—but. She doesn’t know. There was something bordering on _sullen _in Daryl’s tone, like maybe he’s—

Nah. Can’t be.

“Well, I don’t care what they think they know.” Beth looks at Daryl intently as she talks, trying to suss out what she thinks she saw and heard. “Don’t care much about ’em in general, actually. And I’m not gonna go to them, either. And it’s not like I’m asking you to stick your tongue down my throat, but—”

Daryl makes a choking noise, but the cigarette’s still smoldering in his hand, which must mean that Beth stresses him out so badly it’s taking a physical toll on his health. Something to mull over at a later date. For now, she has a sentence to complete.

“—I’m not gonna _pressure_ you into doin’ something you don’t wanna do. That’d be real gross.”

Daryl looks faintly amused at that, if still distinctly uncomfortable. “Girl, you couldn’t _make_ me do anythin’ if you tried.”

Beth wants to explain that pressure isn’t always physical, that it’s very often psychological, but she doubts Daryl’s in the mood for a lecture—mostly because he never is—so she just shrugs.

Daryl goes back to smoking his cigarette, and Beth goes back to helping him keep an eye out for more walkers. None manifest themselves, and she’s just about to remove herself from a situation that’s turned awkward when Daryl speaks up abruptly, sounding toweringly pissed off with the world in general and Beth in particular. “Jesus fuckin’ Christ. You that goddamn curious?”

Beth tears her eyes away from the blonde walker—which is currently teething on a link in the fence—and turns a deer-in-headlights stare on Daryl. Is he saying what she thinks he’s—

Daryl lowers his cigarette and blows smoke through his pursed lips. It flutters around Beth’s face and makes her eyes water again, but she can’t muster up the will to lift her hand and waft it away.

“Answer the damn question,” Daryl growls, and he sounds like that because he’s pissed, but Beth’s brain gets a few wires crossed and interprets that rough scrape as _something else_, something that flushes her from neck to navel and brings her nipples up hard.

Thank God she’s wearing a padded bra.

“Um,” Beth breathes. “Yeah.” Oh, Jesus. Jesus Christ, this is actually happening. She clutches her knees hard to disguise the shaking in her hands. “But only—only if you wanna.”

Daryl rolls his eyes and brings the cigarette to his mouth, but before he takes a hit, he says, “Just hold the hell still, a’right?”

Beth complies a little too eagerly. Sure, she’s in the habit of bossing Daryl around, but that doesn’t mean she’s opposed to being bossed a little herself if it ultimately gets her what she wants. “Holding still, got it,” she says, crossing her heart for good measure.

Daryl rolls his eyes again—that’s the third time since Beth got here—and wraps his lips around the cigarette’s filter. His chest expands as his lungs fill with smoke, but he doesn’t exhale after pulling the cigarette away from his lips. He curls his free hand around Beth’s shoulder, making her skin erupt in another wave of goosebumps, and tugs her around to face him properly. She’s only just remembered to part her lips when he lowers his head and plugs up her mouth with his.

And then he exhales.

Beth nearly wrenches away, not because she doesn’t want this but because her body’s first instinct is to expel anything that isn’t food or oxygen. When buildings burn, it’s not the fire you need to worry about, but the smoke—people _die_ from smoke inhalation, and here Beth is, volunteering to fill her lungs with something that could kill her. Her mouth fills with a hot, sour tang; and her tongue curls back defensively to protect her soft palate; and her eyes are fucking_ burning_, diaphragm itching because she needs fucking oxygen, not tobacco smoke, _oxygen_—

But then the tight clamp Daryl’s got on her shoulder gentles, and his thumb grazes her collarbone, and her constricted throat loosens, and that’s. That’s when the rush hits. That’s when the nicotine lights up her nervous system like a Christmas tree.

It’s kind of like standing up too fast when you’re dehydrated, and if it weren’t for Daryl’s hold on her shoulder, she’d almost certainly tip over—which is probably why he grabbed her in the first place. But Daryl’s got her; he holds her steady and pushes smoke down her throat till there’s none left in his body, till it’s all in _hers_, and, okay. Okay. She gets why people smoke, now. She’s tingling all over the way she does when she’s just gotten herself off and she _understands_.

Daryl turns his face away, but he doesn’t retreat or let her go. Beth presses her forehead to his cheek, hard, trying to ground herself as the initial rush slowly dissipates and smoke trickles out of her open mouth to cloud the air. She blinks her watering eyes open and stares at her own fingers, which are tangled like cat’s claws in Daryl’s undershirt. She doesn’t remember grabbing him.

“Thanks,” she croaks, and a hard puff of air hits her temple. He’s laughing, because Beth was wrong when she first concluded that Daryl doesn’t laugh. He does. Not often, and quietly, but he does.

She’s never been this close to him before—well, she has, but always for practical purposes. They’ve huddled for warmth with the rest of their family; he’s wrenched her out of danger more times than she can count; he’s pushed her up against walls as herds of walkers stumbled by, pinning her in place with hard arms and narrow hips.

But she’s never held onto Daryl _just because_. And he’s letting her. He’s letting her hang onto him. It’s like another hit of nicotine, this revelation, and the ensuing rush sharpens into an arrowhead of desire when Daryl shifts and inadvertently scratches his beard against her forehead. She wonders how that scruff would feel lower down: on her neck, on her breasts, between her legs while he ate her out like a starving man offered a plate of rare steak. No one’s ever done that for her before; no one ever had the chance. Daryl wouldn’t do it, either. She doesn’t even know how to ask him to.

Beth’s fingers curl tighter against Daryl’s chest, knuckles digging into hard muscle. Her chin comes up like somebody’s jerking her around on marionette strings. Her lips bump his.

For a second, Daryl stops breathing. His chest stops moving up and down beneath Beth’s hands, and his breath stops fluttering across her cheeks. But then Beth darts out her tongue to wet her dry, smoke-cracked lips, only it ends up touching _Daryl’s_ lips, and all of a sudden he_ is_ breathing. Hard. He’s breathing into her mouth because he’s kissing her.

Or maybe she’s kissing him. Maybe they’re kissing each other. All Beth knows is that she’s trembling like a hunted jackrabbit, and that her heart’s pounding so hard it’s like she’s nothing but one wet pulse. A pulse and an open mouth.

For a moment, their lips cling like clothes to static, chapped and dry but also _wet_, wet if you just inch in a little bit further—and,_ there_, she can taste tobacco, and she can’t tell if it’s her or him but it’s probably both. Her hands push up his chest where his heart pounds like he’s been running for his life and cup him gently around the throat, thumbs framing the bolts of his stubborn jaw, angling his head so she can kiss him for real, so she can rub her skin raw on that beard and leave a ghost of herself like tobacco smoke down deep in his lungs where he’ll never be able to exorcise her—

“_Fuck_,” Daryl rasps, and it’s only then that Beth realizes he’s pulled his mouth away from hers. She opens her eyes just as Daryl squeezes his shut, lashes trembling against his cheekbones, and Beth’s pounding heart stills for one fraught second before she’s slamming back onto her haunches, wrapping one hand around the nape of his neck and snatching the still-smoldering cigarette out of his shaking grasp before it can burn him, putting it out and flicking it thoughtlessly to one side because Daryl’s on the cusp of panic and it’s _her goddamn fault_.

“Daryl.” Beth presses her forehead against his, hard enough that their bones grind together, and grips him by the nape only because she knows that he could break her hold without a thought. “Daryl, I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Daryl doesn’t say anything. Just sits there, shuddering, swollen mouth inches from Beth’s. She can feel her own lips throbbing, throbbing like the frustrated little pulses in her cunt. Beth rubs her thumb up and down his nape, stretches out her fingers and scratches the base of his skull, and he shudders even harder. But it’s a good shudder this time. She thinks.

“It’s okay,” she keeps whispering, feeling like shit but setting that aside because she’s gotta take care of Daryl right now. He’s what matters. “It’s okay. We don’t gotta. I’m sorry.”

Daryl’s nose knocks into hers when he shakes his head. “I can’t, Beth. I just. I fuckin’ can’t. _Fuck._”

Tears push up Beth’s throat and against the backs of her eyeballs. She did this to him. Her. “Hey, shush. It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m so—I’m so sorry, Daryl. I’m sorry. You didn’t want to, and I made you, and—”

Hard puff of air against her temple. He’s laughing. Why’s he laughing? “Never said I didn’t wanna do it. I just. I can’t deal with this shit, alright? I’m sorry.”

_Never said I didn’t wanna do it_. Beth’s eyes flicker, dropping from Daryl’s flushed face to his lap, and, oh. He’s got an erection; it’s pushing at the crotch of his jeans. His zipper’s teeth are probably hurting him.

Beth’s pussy throbs and her underwear gets slick—slicker. Is he trembling because he’s scared, or because he’s fighting not to fuck her?

Maybe both. Probably both.

“Daryl—”

Whatever Beth was going to say—because even she’s not sure about the _what_—gets drowned out by a gurgling moan. More than one, actually. A chorus, even.

Daryl stumbles to his feet with a curse, and Beth turns her head to peer over the side of the tower. The lone walker has multiplied into three walkers. So, not a chorus. But getting there.

Daryl cocks his bow, sights down the stock, and fires off a bolt that finds its target with unerring accuracy. He’s still hard. Beth squeezes her thighs together, then pushes to her feet, too.

She scratches her fingers against her jeans. The scar on her wrist is itching. “So, I’ll just—”

Daryl doesn’t look at her. “Uh-huh,” he says, and fires another bolt that takes out its target with a squish.

“Okay, well. See you.”

“Yeah.”

Beth stares at him for a minute, at the strong slope of his back, at the filthy jeans that cling to his hips, at the dark hair that’s plastered to the nape of his flushed neck. His shoulders hunch. He can feel her looking at him.

Beth stops looking. She flips the trapdoor open, and she goes.

They’re gonna talk about this, she decides as she descends the ladder. Just not right now. She’s gonna give Daryl some breathing room, but then, by God, they’re talking about this.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains non-graphic allusions to physical and sexual abuse. Please be careful with your precious selves ❤️

“That the last of ’em?”

Daryl rises halfway from his crouch and squints across the Hyundai’s hood at the vacant, fenced-off lot that neighbors the Tractor Supply. Well, the lot’s not vacant anymore, actually—as of now, it’s overflowing with upwards of a dozen walkers, drawn out of the store and through the fence’s open gate by the siren song of a boombox turned up to eleven. As Daryl looks on, two more geeks join the rest, stupid as bloated flies clustering around a jar of honey.

Daryl falls back on his haunches, crossbow pointed at the clear sky. “Might be. No way to know for sure till we actually go in.”

Beth nods. She’s got a length of chain looped around her left arm and a Bowie knife that used to belong to Daryl clenched in a backhanded grip. She’s doing a good job so far, just like Daryl knew she would. “You wanna go shut the gate?”

She doesn’t look at him when she asks the question. That’s good, because she needs to keep her eyes peeled for walkers—what_ isn’t_ good is that_ he_ was looking at _her _long enough to notice that _she_ wasn’t looking at _him_.

Daryl grits his teeth and faces front again. Christ, he’s no better than Carl at his most calf eyed. “Yeah. Can’t waste no more time waitin’ around like this. If there’s more inside, we’ll deal with ’em, same as always.”

The next time they try something like this—and Daryl’s got Michonne to thank for unearthing that boombox from an old RadioShack—they should leave the music playing well ahead of time and come back later. It’ll up their chances of netting more walkers and completely clearing out wherever it is that they intend to loot.

Beth nods again. This time, Daryl only sees it in his periphery, because _this time_, he decidedly _isn’t _looking at her head on.

“Y’ready?” he asks her, bringing his crossbow down with a grunt and bracing himself to rise. He grumbled when Maggie insisted that he wasn’t taking_ her_ little sister out on his _death trap_ of a bike, but the Hyundai’s good cover, and the fact is that they’re going to need the extra space.

If he had his druthers, he wouldn’t’ve brought Beth along at all, but she asked, and if he said no when he normally would’ve said yes, it would’ve been tantamount to admitting that things are _weird _between them, and he’d sooner get a chunk bitten out of his ass than admit to any such thing.

“Ready,” Beth says quietly, and Daryl doesn’t check with her a second time—if she said it, she meant it—just pushes the rest of the way up and darts across the street with Beth close on his heels, hitting the opposite sidewalk and swinging his bow up and out of the way so he can grab the rusty gate and yank it shut with a discordant shriek that he feels in the backs of his teeth. Beth slams her knife into its leather sheath and bounces off the fence before righting herself, scrambling to loop the chain through the hole where the gate’s lock used to be and bind it up tight.

A couple walkers peel away from the boombox and come stumbling in Beth and Daryl’s direction, fingers grasping, teeth clicking. The fuckers are damn fast when they’re worked up enough, and one of them gets its dirty fingernails snagged in Beth’s sleeve in the time it takes Daryl to blink.

Daryl swears internally and points his crossbow at its soft, rotting skull, but he can’t line up a good shot, not with Beth in the way. He feels for the knife at his hip instead, wraps his hand around the hilt and says, “Back off a sec.”

But of course Beth doesn’t back off. She says, “Nah, I got it,” trying for casual even though her voice’s gone all high and thin, and fear starts pounding like a headache between Daryl’s eyeballs. Goddamn stubborn little idiot, gonna get her throat ripped the fuck out, and _then_ what the fuck is Daryl gonna do but go batshit insane—

She doesn’t get her throat ripped out. Doesn’t even get scratched, and trust Daryl when he says he’s looking damn _close _for scratches. She pulls a lock out of her pocket and latches it shut around the chain, then staggers out of the walker’s reach, a seam in her sleeve tearing when she wrenches it out of its grasp. Daryl’s heartrate gradually starts to slow, only to kick back up again when Beth tosses a bright smile his way, chest rising and falling, sweat gleaming at her hairline.

“Toldja I had it,” she says, and for a second, just a second, things feel normal again, like it’s just her and him and one of the easiest—if weirdest—friendships he’s ever known. He even snorts at her, same as he always does when she’s being totally ridiculous in a frustratingly endearing way.

“Yeah, well, jus’ don’t tell your sister that happened, a’right? I’d like to keep my skin, if it’s all the same t’you.”

“Yessir, Mr. Dixon,” she says, smile spreading to show teeth, and then Daryl’s gotta look away because he can’t see her mouth or her teeth or the flash of her pink tongue without remembering that he pushed _his_ tongue halfway down her throat less than a week ago.

Annnd things are back to being weird again. Fucking. _Great_.

“Les’ just get this over with ’fore any more of ’em show up,” Daryl mumbles, feeling in his pocket for the boombox’s remote control and hitting the _off_ button. You wouldn’t expect the abrupt, ringing silence to startle him—he’s long accustomed to a world gone deadly quiet, more quiet even than the woods he practically grew up in—but Beth’s got him feeling jumpy as all hell, so there you fucking have it.

“Alright,” Beth says, and even though Daryl’s not looking at her anymore, he can still hear the absence of a smile in her voice.

Daryl gives a stilted jerk of his chin and heads down the sidewalk. Rick and Hershel got it in their heads to convert those fields around the prison into sustainable farmland, and Michonne came back from failing to hunt down the Governor yesterday with an honest-to-God _horse_ in tow, so if they want feed and seeds, the Tractor Supply’s the first place they oughta look. And while Daryl’s got every wild plant native to Georgia memorized by look if not by name, he knows fuck-all about their domesticated cousins, so it only makes sense to bring along somebody who grew up on a farm.

That was Beth’s argument, anyway. Couldn’t fault her logic, either, much to his unending consternation.

There’s no power left to trigger the automatic doors’ sensors, so Daryl’s gotta pull them open manually, and then he’s stepping into the store’s cavernous belly, crossbow swinging left to right as he does an initial visual sweep.

Seems to be all clear—although, if he’s honest, he’s more worried about the living than the dead, especially where Beth’s concerned. If they ran into anyone who so much as_ looked_ at her funny—well, Daryl probably wouldn’t spare a thought for _innocent until proven guilty_.

Daryl gestures Beth forward, and she pads on past him to grab a cart. She wheels it around to face him, arms braced on the handle, knife dangling from her fingers. “I’ll get the seeds while you grab the feed?”

Yeah, that’s probably for the best. “Uh-huh,” he grunts, shouldering his crossbow and coming over to grab a cart of his own. Gets a weird sense of cognitive dissonance while he’s at it, like the world hasn’t ended and the two of them are out on any old shopping trip.

“Hey.” Beth perks up a little. “Could you keep an eye out for a seeder? It’ll look a little bit like a wheelbarrow—”

“Know what it looks like.” Beth seems to wilt at his repressive tone, and doesn’t _that_ make him feel like a total dickhead. “You see somethin’, you kill it. You can’t kill it, you holler.”

“Yes, Mr. Dixon,” Beth says, a lot less cheerfully than she had earlier. She sounds downright _unhappy_, even, and Daryl can’t help the glance he throws over his shoulder at her.

A glance that turns out to be a massive fucking mistake, because _of course_ he turns around to look just as Beth lifts the hem of her shirt to wipe the sweat from her forehead, giving him a flash of her hard stomach and the white cotton bra that’s pulled taut over two gentle little bumps—

_Fuck_. Daryl whips back around, skin burning so hot it’s a wonder he doesn’t spontaneously combust. He shoves the cart forward and gets moving, mind spinning in dizzy little circles. Ain’t like he’s never seen Beth half naked before; that long winter on the run didn’t exactly allow for modesty. He’s already seen her naked titties and her bare ass and even the wild blonde bush of her pubic hair, and none of it ever moved him before, so why’s he _this_ worked up over a flash of stomach and sports bra?

He picked an aisle at random in his haste to get away from Beth (and her breasts), but it turns out he chose the right one, so that’s the good news. The bad news is that something’s rustling around over here, and he freezes, tensed to swing his crossbow up and over—the cart oughta make for a good shield, at least—only to relax when he spots a rat scurrying around the corner. 

Right. The Tractor Supply’s not as badly ransacked as the pharmacies and the grocery stores, but the bags of feed are prime draws for vermin. Daryl’ll have to check the bags for holes before putting them in the cart; Michonne’ll have his head on a pike if he goes and gives her pretty new horse rabies.

But when Daryl stoops to examine the horse feed, he finds several untouched bags towards the back of the shelf. He packs as many as he can into the cart, then straightens up to survey the aisle. Rick said something about wanting to search abandoned farms for pigs and chickens, so—

So, what? Daryl can’t remember, because his train of thought goes careening off its tracks when he hears it. The humming. Beth’s humming.

_Nat King Cole_, he thinks. One of his love songs. Real slow, real pretty.

But if Daryl hears her, somebody else might, and they left the doors open in case they needed to make a quick escape, which means that anything can wander in. Anything, or anyone.

Daryl starts towards the sound of Beth’s voice, scowling thunderously—only to swing back around with a bitten-off curse when he realizes he forgot the cart. Fuck, goddammit, this girl messes with his head, scrambles his brains around his fucking skull like eggs in a pan.

“Hey,” Daryl hisses as he rounds the corner, knuckles white on his cart’s handlebar. “Hell’re you playin’ at, huh? Hush up, wouldja?”

Beth’s humming cuts out, and she freezes in the attitude of dumping an armful of seed packets into her cart.

“Oh,” she says, tipping the last of them in and dusting off her hands. “Sorry, I didn’t even notice what I was doin’. Guess I just wasn’t thinkin’.”

“Yeah, no kiddin’,” Daryl bites out, and Beth starts to frown.

“You don’t gotta be _mean_ about it,” she says, and, what the fuck? She thinks he’s being mean? He’ll show her _mean_.

“Yeah? What you gonna do about it? Gonna go cryin’ to your folks, tell ’em I was bullying you?”

He doesn’t actually think she’d do that—he damn well knows she _wouldn’t_. It’s like she said: she’s not the type to go whining to her daddy.

He’s not saying this shit because he means it. He’s saying it to be a dick.

And Beth knows it, too, which is why she straightens her skinny shoulders and gives Daryl a withering look that makes him feel like nothing so much as a scolded child. “What the heck is your _problem_?”

A very distant voice is screaming at Daryl that now is not the goddamn time, that he’s acting like a jilted preteen girl, but the same part of him that took over his mouth and made him say nasty shit to Beth grabs him by the tongue and blurts, “The hell is_ my_ problem? The hell’s _your_ problem? You been actin’ weird around me all fuckin’ week!”

Weird. That’s the only word that does it any justice. Not_ cold_, not even all that distant—just plain _weird_. Because she’s stopped keeping him company whenever he’s on watch, is the thing. She’s gone back to staying out of his personal space, too, and Daryl should be grateful for that—he _likes_ his personal space—but something about Beth’s renewed awareness of the boundaries he no longer really has when it comes to her just pisses him the _hell_ of. 

Fuck, he’s surprised she volunteered to come along on this run at all, the way she’s been acting.

“I have _not_,” Beth hisses in a way that suggests she’d be yelling if she could afford to make that much noise.

Daryl gets an insane impulse to counter with “Have _too_,” but he thankfully has just enough tenuous self-control left to curb stomp _that_ shit. “Don’t gimme that bullshit. Are ya pissed ’cause I didn’t wanna fuck around with you? That it?”

Beth rears back like he slapped her, and Daryl gets a brief flash of his mom reeling back from a blow before he shuts that shit down, too. “What? _No. _I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t_ do_ that, Daryl, Jesus.”

Yeah, he knows. He knows that she wouldn’t. But it’s the only explanation he had, so _now_ what is he left with? “Then what the fuck is your problem?”

Beth takes a step forward, and Daryl is suddenly extremely grateful for the cart that’s wedged between them. A rueful little smile plays Beth’s mouth, which—what?

“I. I dunno. I guess I’ve—I guess I’ve been tryin’ to give you some space, s’all.”

_Space_? She’s been trying to _give him some space_? “What the hell for?”

Except he’s pretty sure he knows, and he’s already regretting having asked when Beth ducks her head and says, “I mean, you seemed pretty upset after…y’know, after. And I just wanted to give you some space to breathe, because you deserved it, and because if I didn’t, I was afraid you’d—”

Beth cuts herself off, and Daryl should just drop it, he really goddamn should, but his tongue revolts for the third time today and makes him ask, hoarse and a little wrecked, “’Fraid I’d what?”

Beth’s head is still ducked, loose strands of hair obscuring her face, but Daryl can see her ears, and they’re flushed bright pink. “That you wouldn’t wanna be friends anymore. That you’d, I dunno. Hate me or somethin’.”

Daryl’s throat closes up tight as a bear trap. Jesus. Jesus Christ. She really doesn’t get it, does she? 

“Don’t hate you,” Daryl croaks. Beth’s head comes slowly up, which means that Daryl’s gotta point his_ down_ because he_ cannot _fucking look her in the eye while he says this shit. But she was straight with him, so he’s gotta give something back. “I’m just. I ain’t any good at this shit.”

“_What _shit?” 

Oh, Christ. She’s gonna make him say it, ain’t she? “Shit like what we was doin’ in the guard tower,” he mumbles, imagining that he can hear Merle’s laughter echoing in his head.

“That’s okay,” Beth says, and, dammit, that’s definitely a note of hope Daryl hears. “Neither am I. I mean, Jimmy was my first boyfriend, and then the world kind of ended before we could really get anywhere—”

Oh, shit. Oh, SHIT, what is she saying? Is she saying what he thinks she’s saying?

“—but we could get better at it together,” Beth finishes. “You and me.”

The shored-up strength in her voice is like a communicable disease, somehow giving Daryl the courage to meet her eyes, but he just about looks away again when he sees what’s in them. When he sees all that naked _potential_. “Don’t matter. I wouldn’t be no good for you, girl, and besides, I’m twice your goddamn age. Ain’t got no business foolin’ around with a fuckin’ teenager.”

Beth laughs, but it’s not an amused sound. It’s the kinda noise folks make when they can’t believe what they’re hearing. “You really think that kinda thing matters anymore? And I might be younger than you, but I think I’m old enough to make my own decisions.”

She…has a point. Doesn’t mean Daryl has to acknowledge it. “Beth—"

But she steamrolls right over him, because anyone who thinks that _Maggie’s_ the stubbornest Greene sister clearly hasn’t met Beth. “Lemme ask you somethin’. D’you like me _because _I’m younger than you?”

Daryl. Cannot even process Beth outright stating that he likes her, so he just moves right on to the other half of her question, the half that made his stomach twist like he was gonna be sick. “The fuck? _No_.”

Beth nods, like that’s exactly the answer she was expecting. “So it’s not like you’ve got a _thing_ for people who’re younger than you. It’s not like you’re _preying on_ me. You’re not taking advantage of me. If you really don’t like me, or if you just aren’t ready to do anythin’ about it, I’ll leave you alone. Promise. But you shouldn’t let my age stop you, because _I’m_ not goin’ to let it stop _me_.” 

It’s not about her age, though, is the thing. Not really. That’s just an excuse. Just another justification for him to hide behind so he doesn’t have to face the reality that’s standing right in front of him.

Reality’s got a stubborn chin and clear blue eyes. Reality’s practically fucking _daring_ him to do something about what he’s feeling, to stop being such a goddamn _pussy_ and just take what he wants, to grab this gorgeous young girl by the throat and fucking _consume_ her like a last meal.

Daryl stares reality in her beautiful face, and something inside of him breaks with an almost audible snap.

She wants him? Fine. She can fucking have him, and see if she doesn’t wind up regretting it.

Driven by a sick intersection of rage and lust, lust like he’s never felt before and probably never will again for anyone but_ her_, Daryl shrugs off his crossbow and sets it carelessly down in the cart’s belly before kicking the stupid thing aside, pissed at an inanimate object for having the audacity to get between him and what he wants even though_ he _was the one to put it there in the first fucking place.

What he wants. What he wants stares at him with wide eyes as his shadow falls over her like an oil spill. _What he wants_ breathes out hard in shock when he anchors one hand on her waist and wraps the other around the base of her ponytail, holding her still and pointing her mouth _up_, up towards _his _mouth, the mouth that’s been fucking_ starving_ for her all goddamn week.

He’s so pissed that he barely even registers the soft give of her lips or the lingering taste of breakfast on her tongue or the hard jut of her chin, but none of that matters, because this isn’t really a kiss, anyway. Even accounting for all that lust boiling in his belly, he doesn’t mean for this to go anywhere. He’s just trying to scare her straight. Just trying to make her see sense.

Because she doesn’t want this, not with him. Might_ think_ that she does, somewhere in that stubborn teenage head of hers, but once she’s faced with the ugly reality of what it means to get up close and personal with a Dixon, she’ll slap at him and scream at him, just as she damn well _should_—

And Beth’s long fingers snag in his greasy hair, but not to wrench his mouth off of hers so she can scream in his face. No, she binds them tighter together, gasps into his mouth, goes up on her toes and plasters every inch of her front against every inch of his, and she’s. She’s kissing him back.

She’s kissing him back, and Daryl folds like a house of cards.

Because he ain’t never been kissed like this before—even that kiss in the guard tower was too brief and too tentative for Daryl to feel all that much of her. But he feels her _now_: feels her clinging hands and the hard push of her soft mouth, feels the way she tries to climb up his body like she wants nothing more than to crawl down his throat and build a nest inside of him.

And he gets it—God, he gets it, because _he_ wants nothing more than to crawl inside of _her_. To eat her from the inside out.

Is this how walkers feel? Is it?

Nah. Can’t be. All a walker feels is unfulfilled hunger for fresh meat. And this is hunger, yeah, but not for food. Daryl knows what it’s like to teeter on the brink of starvation, but he’s never felt starved for sex, not in his entire goddamn life. Not until _now_, not until _her_.

“_Fuck_.” Daryl shapes the word against Beth’s open mouth, and she inhales it like oxygen. “Fuck—”

He grabs onto her ass, and she rocks into the touch, rocks back and forth between his hands and his hips. And, shit, she might look skinny, but her ass is plush against his palms, sweet as a ripe peach, and he’d like to linger over it, but right now he’s gotta get more of her on more of him, so he wraps his hands around the backs of her thighs. Hoists her up with a muted grunt, and she obligingly hooks those endless legs around his waist so she can grind her hot little pussy against his dick. 

The fact that he doesn’t immediately go off in his pants is an honest-to-God miracle. Still, the sensation hits him like a kick to the spine, sends him stumbling forward into one of the shelves, and that he’s got the presence of mind to peel one hand off of Beth’s ass in order to cradle her skull and protect her from bruising is yet another miracle. And Beth huffs, but she doesn’t cry out in pain—just breaks away from Daryl’s mouth to pant against his cheek, buffets of warm breath rippling across his scruff like thermals.

Logically, he understands that they both need to breathe, but he couldn’t keep his mouth off of her right now if someone held a gun to his head, so he starts in on her neck, rolling his tongue across her jugular to lap up her drying sweat. And Beth can’t seem to keep her mouth off of him, either, because she’s kissing his cheek, and then his throat, and then she’s baring her hard little teeth and sucking bruises onto his skin—and if he goes back home with visible hickeys, he’s a dead man, but he doesn’t give a shit. Doesn’t give a shit about anything but grinding his dick into the V of Beth’s thighs like he could fuck her right through their clothing; doesn’t care about anything but the noises she’s making for him, sweet as any old-school love song.

Another one of those pretty noises hums in Beth’s throat as she scratches her nails through the hair growing at the nape of his neck, and the resultant feeling that goes shooting down his spine sends his knees to buckling. He catches himself halfway down, at least, before he can fall and hurt Beth, turning the pull of gravity into something more deliberate, something that gets her spread out beneath him and pinned to the grimy floor.

He gets a blurred flash of blue and white and pink, and then he’s on her again, pulling hot, wet, clumsy kisses off her mouth, still trying and failing to sate the hunger that isn’t hunger. Beth takes everything he gives her and more, drawing up one leg to cradle his hip, getting him slotted into place against her pussy like he belongs there. Daryl’s cock jerks at the feel of her, drooling pre-come, fucking _slavering_ for it.

_So why ain’t you doin’ anythin’ about it? Huh? You limp-dicked little pussy, got this sugary young cunt spread out under you an’ no one around to stop you, so why don’t you jus’ give her your fuckin’ dick already? The bitch’s gagging for it, for Christ’s sake. _

_Fuck no_. Daryl wants to scream, wants to cry like a little bitch, because he’s used to his brother’s voice haunting him from beyond the grave, but this ain’t Merle he’s hearing. He _wishes_ it were Merle.

_She’s a virgin, ain’t she? Bet she is. Boy, you best get in that tight lil’ pussy ’fore some other asshole comes along and stretches it out for you. C’mon, now. Y’ain’t never gonna get a chance like this again. _

Fuck. _Fuck._ It’s been ages since Daryl’s heard his no-good pop’s voice shouting at him in his head, and it just fucking figures that the dumb dead bastard would choose to make himself known now of all times. Of course he’s gonna taint the one thing Daryl’s ever allowed himself to want. Of fucking course he is.

Panic floods Daryl’s system, because he can’t do this, he fucking _can’t,_ he can’t think about the things his dad would want him to do to Beth, of the things Will Dixon _himself_ would wanna do to Beth—hurt her, make her cry, slap her around and laugh while he did it—

Daryl rips his mouth off of Beth’s with a noise halfway to a sob, wraps his arms around her, and rolls onto his back so she’s on top, so he’s no longer crushing her slim little body to the floor the way his dad would want him to.

“Daryl?” Beth asks, and he can’t take the way she’s looking at him, like she’s _worried_, like she’s afraid that she did something wrong, so he shakes his head, grabs her by the nape of her neck—gently, though, gentler than his pop ever would—and hauls her into another kiss.

Beth hesitates, and Daryl’s about to give up and apologize when her lips start moving again, sweetly, so goddamn sweetly, and then building slowly back up to heated—heated, but still so fucking _tender_ under all the urgency. Sloppy, too, landing on his cheeks and chin as often as his mouth, getting saliva all over his scruff, not that he gives a solitary shit. And when he tries to tilt his face away from hers, just for a second, just long enough to catch his breath, she cups his jaw in her soft hand and drags him back in for more, and you know what? Who needs to breathe when you’ve got Beth Greene’s tongue in your mouth?

Her tongue in his mouth, her hands on his face, her tits pushing at his chest, her long hair tumbling over her shoulder to tickle his neck. God, this is so much better. This dials his dad’s voice down to little more than a surly mumble. This lets him focus on what matters: Beth, just Beth. Beth, spread out warm and firm on top of him, ruffling her fingers through his hair and scratching her nails against his scalp like he’s a big cat—or a feral mutt.

And if that’s what she wants him to be, he’ll take it. He’ll take anything she’s willing to give.

One of them moans—not him. Not her, either. So who the hell is responsible for that racket?

Oh.

_Oh, shit. _

Beth’s already scooting off of him, wobbling to her feet and rushing over to the cart, heaving up his crossbow and passing it over. Daryl nods in acknowledgement and swings around, comes up on his knees, nails the walker that’s stumbling towards them in the eye so it goes down like a felled tree. 

Daryl lowers his crossbow, panting, and shoots a disbelieving look Beth’s way when he hears her giggle. 

“Sorry.” Beth’s kiss-swollen lips push into a pout, and, fuck, Daryl’s gonna be hard for the rest of his life thanks to this girl and that mouth. “Sorry, it’s just—that was some moment killer, huh?”

Daryl’s got an itch in his throat. He coughs to clear it up, but it doesn’t do him much good. “Uh, yeah. Guess it was.” 

But Beth’s smile is already fading. She falls into a crouch and fiddles with her fingers, the fingers that were just cupping Daryl’s jaw and holding him still so she could drag more and more kisses off his willing mouth.

“We oughta go—”

“Yeah.”

Beth stops fidgeting. She gives him another one of those steely _I-dare-you-to-turn-tail-and-run_ looks. “But, um. I wanna talk about this. When we get back to the prison. If that’s alright with you.”

No, it really isn’t, but Beth deserves this much, at least, so Daryl gives a slow, grudging nod.

“Yeah. Guess we should.” 

And, fuck him sideways, but he actually fucking means it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Nat King Cole song that Beth hums in this chapter is "When I Fall in Love."


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, this chapter contains non-graphic allusions to domestic abuse. In happier news, my darling Maj made a [beautiful aesthetic](https://mygutsforgarters.tumblr.com/post/188029748559) inspired by this fic, and I insist that you all go look at it right now immediately. You'll be glad you did ❤️

Folks at the prison like to joke that they wouldn’t want to run a blacklight over any of the guard towers, and for damn good reason: they’re the post-apocalyptic answer to no-tell motels, apparently, in that they’re about as private as it’s gonna get for anyone looking to fuck. But Daryl didn’t bring Beth up here for _that_, hell no, even if his dick’s still halfway hard. Even if he’s still carrying a sullen, frustrated ache around in his too-heavy balls.

Christ, he needs a cigarette. Would light up right the fuck now if he hadn’t already finished off the pack Beth gave him a week ago, the fucking Marlboros that started this shit up in the first place. Usually he’s better at rationing them out, making them last, but he usually doesn’t have Beth Greene’s warm wet mouth on the brain, either.

_Fuck. _

Beth gives him wide, startled Bambi eyes. “You okay?”

Shit. He said that out loud, didn’t he? “Yeah,” he says, even though it’s a goddamn lie, but what else’s he gonna tell her? People don’t ask you that because they want to hear the truth; they ask it ’cause it’s expected, ’cause it’s the _polite_ thing to say, but they sure as shit aren’t interested in knowing how you’re _actually_ doing.

But—nah. That ain’t fair of him. If it were anybody else, sure, but Beth’s already proven that she’s not just _anybody._ If she asked if he’s okay, then she wants to know the truth.

And that’s the whole point of all this, ain’t it? To tell her the truth. To talk through whatever the hell this is, to explain what they’re thinking and feeling and where they wanna go from here. Which would be difficult enough even if he _did_ know how to explain what he’s feeling, and believe him when he says that he absolutely doesn’t.

The toes of his boots brush corrugated metal, and that’s when he realizes he’s pacing the length of the guard tower like a caged fucking animal.

_Shit_. He hooks a finger in his collar and peels it away from his damp throat. It’s fucking boiling in here.

“Daryl?”

“Yeah,” he grunts, not looking at her, eyes scanning the tree line for movement even though nothing’s going on out there, even though it’s just an excuse not to look Beth in the face.

“You brought me up here to talk, didn’t you?”

In theory. “Uh-huh. So?”

“_So_,” Beth says, infinitely patient in a way that makes Daryl want to start yelling at her, “it’s been somethin’ like ten minutes since we got here, and we still haven’t, y’know. Actually talked.”

A squirrel races up a tree trunk, disappearing into its web of branches before Daryl can decide whether or not to bother shooting at it. Probably wouldn’t’ve been able to hit the thing from this distance, anyway.

Out of excuses to keep putting off the inevitable, Daryl swings around and points his crossbow at the floor, scowling at Beth from under his overgrown bangs. Christ, but he needs to trim ’em or something, oughta just flip open his buck knife and start hacking away till his hair’s as short as it was when the world first went to shit.

“Talkin’ right now, ain’t we?”

Beth crosses her arms and frowns at him in that way that makes him feel like he sometimes did in grade school, on the rare occasion that a teacher'd care enough about the dumb white trash kid’s future to be _disappointed _in him, all, _I know you can do better than that, Daryl. _

He couldn’t. Never did. But there was a time when he _wanted_ to.

He realizes, then, that he wants to do better for Beth, too. He _does_, but fuck if he knows where to start.

Well—alright. Maybe he does. Could try being less of a raging asshole, for one thing.

He blows out an unsteady breath. Hooks his crossbow’s strap over his shoulder and goes to where Beth’s sitting in the little metal folding chair that somebody or other shoved into a corner of the guard tower a couple of weeks ago. Daryl doesn’t know why they bothered, ’cause it ain’t much more comfortable than the floor, and the floor is where he crouches now, kneeling at Beth’s feet like a penitent at church.

Daryl’s never cared much for kneeling, not for God and not for anybody else, but Beth’s different. She’s different in just about every way that matters.

He rasps his nails against his crossbow’s nylon strap, and his eyes snag on the V of Beth’s parted thighs before darting away and focusing on a point just over her shoulder. He doesn’t even know what he’s gonna say until he says it.

“M’sorry.”

Beth’s eyebrows pull together, but she ain’t frowning ’cause she’s mad, he don’t think. No, he’s pretty sure she’s just confused. “What for?”

Jesus, he doesn’t know. Everything? “Shouldn’t’a kissed you back there,” is what he settles on, eyes falling away from the shell of her ear to focus on his own dirty boots. “Not like that.”

Not ’cause he was angry. Fuck, he should know better than to touch her when he’s angry.

Beth sighs, and Daryl can’t tell if it’s sad or annoyed. Would know, if he could bring himself to look her in the face and dissect her expression. He can’t, he can’t make himself do that, but he makes it to her lap, at least. Her fingers flex like she wants to touch him, to reach out and comb through his hair or something.

He doesn’t think he’d mind it if she tried. Might even like it.

“Then I should apologize, too,” she says, fingers weaving together in a wickerwork pattern like she’s gotta hang on to herself to keep from hanging on to _him_. “I kissed you without asking first, remember?”

_Now_ Daryl looks at her, frowning. What the hell is she—

Oh. She’s talking about the first time, ain’t she? But that don’t make no sense. Near as Daryl recalls, _he’s_ the one who kissed _her_. He’s the one who took it and turned it from shotgunning a cigarette into something else, something bigger.

But, well. Maybe that ain’t Beth’s interpretation of events. If she thinks _she _kissed _him_, then that, what, makes it mutual? Makes it something they both wanted, and not just something he took?

He doesn’t know what to do with any of that, can’t fucking process it, so he just mumbles, “Don’t gotta apologize for that shit.”

“Then neither do _you_,” Beth says, triumphant, like she just proved some kinda point. And, hell, maybe she did. “Daryl, I just wanna know if you—”

She cuts herself off, and Daryl scowls, irritation rumbling in his gut like a stomachache. He’s already sick with anxiety; he doesn’t need her stringing him out like this on top of all _that_. “Spit it out, girl, Jesus.”

Beth gives him a _you asked for it_ look. She sticks out her chin like she had at the Tractor Supply, stubborn and defiant and so fucking brave, and she says, “D’you wanna be with me or not?”

Daryl clenches his jaw. It ain’t like he wasn’t expecting this, but still. _Still._

Thing is, he wants to give her a straight answer, because she deserves one, and because he hates screwing around, but he already told her that he’s no good at this, didn’t he?

But, okay, alright. Does he want her? Fuck, yeah, he does. He wants her so badly he’s aching with it, but does he want to _do_ something about it?

Shit. Shit. He doesn’t know. He really does not. Maybe if they were the same age, but—nah. It wouldn’t matter if he was still eighteen, just like it wouldn’t matter if Beth was nineteen or twenty or thirty-five. It ain’t about her age, or his. Like he said before, that's just an excuse. Just something else for him to hide behind so he doesn’t have to confront the truth.

And the truth is that he’s scared shitless.

He gnaws on his thumbnail even though there ain’t much left to gnaw on, even though he’s just about chewed the damn thing down to the quick. Fuck, _he doesn’t want to talk about this_, but he’s gotta. “Y’know ’bout my dad, right?”

He hasn’t really spoken about it to any of them, and Beth’s never seen his back as far as he knows, but you can’t keep secrets in a group as small as theirs formerly was. Not for long, anyway.

“A little bit,” Beth says, kind of tentatively like she thinks he’ll get pissed again or something if she admits to knowing anything at all about his past. “Why?”

Daryl eyeballs her, incredulous. Is she seriously asking him that question? Doesn’t she get that this kinda thing’s in the fucking blood? Even Hershel—kind, fatherly Hershel, who resembles no one so much as fucking Santa Claus—couldn’t escape his own father’s legacy. Sure, he never hit his kids or his wives, but his demons manifested themselves in other ways. Of course they did. No matter what, they always find a way out.

“_Why_?” he echoes, voice as hoarse as if he _had_ been smoking. “The fuck you mean, _why_? ’Cause my dad slapped his women around, that’s fuckin’ why. What makes you think I’d be any different, huh?”

And Beth—Beth’s eyes are so, so sad, and doesn’t that just make him want to tear off his fucking skin, just fucking shed it like a snake and go crawling away on his belly like the bottom dweller he is. But then those sad eyes spark with something like anger, and that. That, at least, he knows how to handle.

“’Cause my dad ain’t like_ his_ dad. _That’s_ goddamn why.”

Hearing her cuss—even mildly—startles him, same as it always does. He doesn’t know why. Ain’t like she’s never done it in front of him before. It just sounds weird, he guesses, in her high pretty voice, coming out of her pink little mouth.

“Yeah, well.” He ducks his head, brushes his stupid fucking bangs impatiently aside when they flop into his eyes again. “I ain’t your daddy.” Although, Christ, he’s old enough that he could be, ain’t he? And he just admitted that it wasn’t about the years between them, not really, but fuck if that still doesn’t make him wanna squirm just a little. “An’ he might not’a ever hit nobody, but it still fucked him up, didn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Beth says flatly, and he can tell without looking at her that she doesn’t appreciate him dragging her father’s alcoholism into this. Well, tough titty. She didn’t wanna hear it, she shouldn’t’ve prodded at him the way she did. “Yeah, it did. But he never slapped women around, and I don’t think _you_ have, either. _Have_ you?”

It’s a rhetorical question, he’s pretty sure—Beth wouldn’t want anything to do with him if she thought he was that type—but he still says, “Nah.” The crossbow on his back suddenly feels heavy as a goddamn crucifix, and he slides it off his shoulders, sets it carefully down. Looks Beth square in the eye. “But I ain’t really had occasion to try.”

He really hasn’t. Few one-night stands, here and there, courtesy of the women Merle would push at him like disposable commodities, but he never had a, what, a _girlfriend_, and he’s sure as shit never been married. Never had a woman _to_ slap around, really. How’s he supposed to know that it wouldn’t’ve eventually come out of him if he _had_?

But Beth doesn’t back down; of course she fucking doesn’t. And speaking of Merle, he’d surely be impressed by this girl’s brass balls, were he still here to watch her swing ’em around. “Do you _want_ to hurt me?”

Daryl can actually _feel_ himself blanch. “I—no. Nah.” But just ’cause he doesn’t _want _to doesn’t mean that he _wouldn’t_. He’s got Dixon blood running through his veins, after all, and even if Merle never raised his hand to a woman, well, he had other ways of exorcising his demons, didn’t he? Booze and coke and meaningless sex, all that. All Daryl’s got are his stale Marlboros, when he can find them.

He doesn’t know that he wouldn’t hurt Beth. He _can’t _know that he wouldn’t hurt Beth.

But Beth says, “Then you won’t,” like it’s just that fucking easy, and then, oh, Christ, her hands are cupping his face and her fingers are ruffling through his scruff, and he wants nothing more than to lean into her like a touch-starved mutt. “You won’t, Daryl.”

Daryl digs his fingers into his thighs, ’cause if he doesn’t, he’ll do something crazy like grab her and kiss her. Her mouth’s _right fucking there_. But he can’t touch her when he’s feeling like this. No fucking way. Not again. “You don’t fuckin’ know that. You ain’t got no way’a knowin’ that.”

“Yeah, I _do_,” Beth insists, voice going hard and stubborn even as her hands remain gentle, even as she cards her fingers through his hair and makes his scalp tingle. “’Cause I know _you_. You’re too—too _decent _to ever do a thing like that.”

Daryl can’t help it: he snorts. _Decent_, huh? It really would take the end of the world, wouldn’t it, for someone like _him _to become the new standard for _decency_.

Beth’s lips quirk. “What’s so funny, huh?” she asks, _croons_, all soft and sweet now the way she usually is. God, what’s a girl like her want with an asshole like him, anyhow?

“Nothin’.” He shakes his head, and Beth’s fingers slide up and down his cheeks, thumbs catching on the underside of his jaw. “You’re jus’ nuts, s’all.”

“Sweet talker.” Beth’s lips pull into a grin, stretching like pink taffy, and, shit, fuck, Daryl wants to kiss her. Thinks it might even be okay now, now that he’s stopped feeling so rotten. And, hell, when did that even happen?

This girl. There’s just something about this goddamn amazing girl.

“Hey, uh.” He clears his throat, and it’s so dry it clicks. “You said you wanted to gimme space, right? So why’d you come along on that supply run with me? I ain’t complainin’,” he hastens to add, because he doesn’t wanna hurt Beth’s feelings any worse than he already has. “Was just. Wonderin’.”

“Oh, that.” Beth shrugs. Bites her lip in a way that drives Daryl half crazy. “Just got tired of waiting, I guess. And I figured you wouldn’t be able to run away if you were stuck out there with me, y’know? Sorry if I kind of cornered you.”

Christ. Jesus Christ. That should probably piss him off a little—or a lot—but honestly, it just makes him want to kiss her _more_.

And Beth must read it in his eyes or something. Maybe he licked his lips or stared at her mouth for too long, who the fuck knows. Point is, her pupils dilate, yawning wider than they should with all the buttery afternoon sunlight that’s pouring into the guard tower, and her pulse throbs like a rabbit’s in her throat, and, fuck. _Fuck_.

Her lips part, flashing the wet, glimmering inside of her mouth, showing off her little pink tongue and the gleam of her teeth. His hand’s on her face, and he doesn’t remember putting it there, doesn’t remember tucking his thumb against the dip of her chin like he’s trying to coax her mouth wider for a kiss.

Beth leans in, slow and cautious, lashes shivering against her cheekbones, and Daryl ducks his head. Drops his hand, wraps his arms around her middle, and squeezes his face against her abdomen, shuddering.

He can’t. Fuck. He _can’t_.

Beth combs her fingers through his hair and circles her thumbs against his temples like she’s trying to soothe away a headache. “Daryl?”

He shakes his head. Breathes in hard through his nose, inhaling the smell of old sweat and clothes that need washing. She’s just. She’s so fucking warm and so fucking _here_.

“Daryl, are you okay?”

Definitely not.

“Daryl? Can you please look at me?”

Nuh-uh. No fucking way. He tucks his face against her lap instead, breathing her in through his parted lips now. Her pussy’s so goddamn close, burning hot through her jeans, and her breath catches when he noses at her inseam.

Fuck. She’s gonna shove him off, ain’t she? Why shouldn’t she? He won’t kiss her, but he’ll sniff her crotch like a goddamn dog, what the_ fuck_—

She doesn’t push him off. No, she worms a hand between them and fucking. Just. Unsnaps and unzips her jeans, parting the teeth of her zipper to give him a peek of her underwear. Too dingy to say for sure what color they used to be, but he thinks they might once have been white.

Daryl’s never been this hard in his entire goddamn life.

He screws his eyes shut and press his nose flush against her, breathing her in, and, oh, fuck. No, he hasn’t had a lot of sex, but he knows what a wet pussy smells like, and this is it. The smell never appealed to him all that much before, but it does _now_, because it’s _Beth_. Because it’s Beth and she’s wet for _him_.

He opens his mouth and presses it against the fleshy mound of her cunt, too high up to get at her pussy lips—couldn’t, anyway, with her positioned the way she is—and runs his tongue over thin cotton that sucks the moisture right out of his mouth. He can’t taste much, but what he does taste is enough to make him pant.

And then, oh, Christ. Beth fucking. Nudges him gently aside so she can dip her fingers into her underwear, and when she pulls them back out, the tips are wet with thick tacky fluid that gleams like syrup.

And she. She tucks them into Daryl’s open mouth. Presses them down against his tongue. Gives him a taste of her sweet little cunt, and he sucks it right up with a tortured kind of moan, sucks on her fingers the way he wants to suck on her clit, eyelids dropping shut like they’re attached to leaded weights, dick drooling in his jeans.

He lays his head against her sturdy thigh, still nursing on her fingers, and she pets his hair with her free hand. Asks him a question.

“D’you want to be with me?”

Fuck. There’s only one right answer to that, ain’t there?

Daryl slurps Beth’s come off her fingers. Hugs her tighter.

Nods.

“Good.” Beth’s voice wavers, but she’s smiling. He can tell. “That’s good. I’m glad.”

And, shit. So is he.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look, I know I've been jerking you guys around for a few chapters now, but we're finally poised to make good on that femdom tag. Soon, y'all. Soon 👀


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big love to Maj for looking this over ❤️ All remaining goofs are my own.

Beth’s not certain of much these days, but she _is_ certain that she hasn’t been this happy since before the world ended and half her family died twice (once when the virus took them and again when their shambling corpses were gunned down in front of her). It’s an uncomplicated kind of happiness, like the dead aren’t walking and neither of them will have to get up tomorrow morning weighed down by the reality that they and their loved ones might not make it to nightfall, and Daryl gave her this rare and precious feeling just by nodding his head.

_D’you want to be with me?_

_Yeah._

And the thing is, she’s so grateful she could cry—grateful that he gave her this, grateful that _he’s_ willing to give them a chance no matter how crazy it may look on paper—but she blinks back the pressure building behind her eyeballs and locks down the lump rising in her throat because _no way_ is she gonna cry in front of him and make him think that he did something wrong. He’s settled down, sprawled warm and heavy across her lap and nursing at her fingers even though there’s certainly nothing left on them to lap up—and, Jesus, since when is she so goddamn _brazen_ as to let a man lick the taste of her cunt off her hand? Who the hell _is_ she anymore?—but he’s still stripped raw and vulnerable, she can feel it in the sporadic tremors that rock through his muscles, and if he saw tears in her eyes right now, this thing that they’ve only just laid the foundations for might come tumbling down.

_You won’t, Daryl._

_You don’t fuckin’ know that. You ain’t got no way’a knowin’ that._

He thinks he’s just like his dad, or at least, he thinks it’s inevitable that he _will be _given the chance, given a woman of his own to potentially _slap around_. Even now that he’s agreed to give the two of them a shot, there’s no way he’s shaken his doubts off entirely. Trauma doesn’t work that way, and his is written into his bones, carved by the lashes of a belt into his back.

Beth fights not to clench her fingers in Daryl’s hair, because she doesn’t wanna hurt him any more than he wants to hurt her. She grits her teeth instead, jaw clamping so tight she can feel the pain of it lancing into her temples, because, _God_. God forgive her, but if Daryl’s father were still alive, she’d kill him with her own two hands. She’s never killed the living, not even in self-defense, but for Daryl, she’d make a murderer out of herself.

She wonders if that would disturb him, and just as quickly decides that it wouldn’t. He understands her. They understand _each other_.

They’re two of a kind. You wouldn’t know it from looking at them, and even members of their own family might scoff at the suggestion—Maggie certainly would, anyway—but they are. That’s why this pull between them was inevitable, why she can’t see herself in the long term with anyone but him.

_The long term_. She’d probably scare him right off if she started talking about long-term stuff within literal minutes of getting him to admit that he wants to be with her at all, and probably against his better judgment anyway, so maybe she should just focus on what immediately comes next. 

Except that’s where she stalls, and ain’t that funny? She knows exactly what she wants in the long term—because what she wants is him, period—but she has no idea what to do with herself in this very moment. Should she try kissing him again? She thinks he’d probably let her this time. Or maybe she should wait for him to make the first move—

Her train of thought stalls on its tracks when Daryl flicks his tongue across her fingers one last time before sitting back on his heels, arms uncoiling from around her waist so his hands are resting on her thighs. Beth settles her hands in her lap, too, spit-sticky fingers curling against her palm. He’s still touching her, scratching lightly at her jeans with his ragged nails, so that’s a good sign, right? But even though he hasn’t pulled away entirely, he hasn’t said anything, either. No, he’s just staring at her, and Beth doesn’t know what to do with the look on his face.

She _does_ know that her pants are still unzipped, and that she should probably correct that. A belated blush paints a hot line across her nose and cheekbones, and she fumbles to pull her zipper shut, but—

But Daryl wraps his hand around hers and presses it back down against her thigh, and the startled look she gives him lasts only as long as it takes for him to sit forward on his knees and lean in for a kiss.

So, alright. Guess that’s what happens next.

Relief liquifies the tense set to Beth’s spine only to get washed away by a surge of anticipation that makes her toes curl and her lips tingle, and she moves in eagerly to meet him in the middle—_too_ eagerly, as it turns out, because if she’d just sat the hell still and _waited_ for him to get there on his own, she wouldn’t’ve knocked their noses together like she just did.

“Ow, _fuck_.”

Beth’s too caught up in the hot, dull pain that spreads out from her nose and into the rest of her face to be sure which of them said that, and then she’s too busy being crushed under the weight of mortification to care. She cupped a hand over her nose when the pain first hit, but she doesn’t even stop to check that it’s broken—probably isn’t—before she’s dropping it to frame Daryl’s face instead.

“Oh my God, Daryl, are you alright? Your nose isn’t broken, is it?”

Daryl bats her hands away—gently, she can’t help but notice—and gives his nose what looks to Beth like an inadvisably hard prod.

“Naw,” he pronounces, and leaves it at that.

Beth frowns at him, hands hovering inches above her legs. God, so much for setting the mood. Except she guesses that humiliation is _a_ mood. Just not the one she was going for.

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Been busted before. Know how it feels.” Before Beth can dissect _that_—does he mean it’s been busted in barfights, or is he talking about something uglier? Both?—Daryl cups _her_ face in _his _hands and tilts it back on her neck. “You’re the one m’worried about. My head’s a helluva lot harder’n yours.”

The pain in her nose has already begun to fade, and she’s positive now that it isn’t busted, but she’s not about to push Daryl’s hands off of her, either. His thumbs are sweeping up and down her cheekbones in a way that feels more unconscious than anything, just more of his fidgeting, but it feels real nice. She decides not to draw attention to it, because then he might stop.

She smirks a little, scoffs. “I dunno about _that_, Mr. Dixon,” she says, and Daryl flushes and drops his hands into his lap. Damn. She brushes tentative fingers over his scruffy jaw, and it could be that he just happened to turn his head at that same moment, but she’s pretty sure he leans into the touch. “I’m fine. Promise. Just embarrassed.”

He frowns at her, but it’s not an angry expression. Looks more confused than anything. “Hell you embarrassed for?”

Beth blinks at him. Is he messing with her? Nah, he wouldn’t. Not like this. “Um, I nearly busted both our damn faces open, or didn’t you notice?”

Daryl huffs at her, warm breath buffeting her fingers. “Yeah, smartass, I fuckin’ noticed. Still dunno what the hell you got to be embarrassed about. Ain’t like ya did it on purpose, didja?”

“Well, _obviously_ not.”

He swats her lightly on the thigh when she sasses him again, and she jerks and giggles, hand falling away from his face to clutch at the frayed sleeve of his shirt. She thinks he might even smile a little when she laughs, but it’s Daryl, so who really knows. Maybe he’s just gotta sneeze.

“So don’t fuckin’ worry about it.” He wraps his hand around the back of her calf, squeezes. “Alright?”

Jesus, who gave him the right to be this damn sweet? She strokes a light finger down the bridge of his unbroken nose, smiling when he wrinkles it. It’s a cute nose. She likes it, and she’s glad she didn’t break it.

“Alright,” she says, and it comes out quieter than she meant it to. She pushes her fingers into his hair, smiling wider when his eyes slit in reaction to the scratch of her nails. Lord, but he’s practically purring. “So can we, uh—you mind if we try that again?”

He seems to blink himself out of the blissful stupor she was putting him into. Smirks. “What, you tryna bust my nose open for real this time?”

_Unbelievable_. “You’re a _jerk_,” Beth complains, pulling away from him to cross her arms over her chest and turn her head to one side so she doesn’t have to look at his _stupid face_.

So, no, she’s not looking at him, but she still hears the smile in his voice when he says, “Yeah. Guess I am.” And she sees that smile for herself—small and only really visible at the very corners of his mouth—when he wraps his fingers around her chin, angles his head so their noses _aren’t _on a direct collision course, and smothers her scowl with a kiss.

It was only a few hours ago that they were making out on the Tractor Supply’s dusty, grungy floor, and only a week before _that_ that they kissed for the very first time, but this still feels like their _real _first kiss, and maybe that’s because they went about it all wrong those other two times. This isn’t half accidental or fueled by hurt feelings. It’s clumsy and eager and _hungry_. It’s everything Beth wants. It’s everything it _should_ be.

Beth forgets her irritation the second his lips land on hers—which, damn, is probably what he was going for to start with, and she’s _definitely_ gonna be annoyed about that later—tipping into him with a gasp that gets eaten up by his tongue, a tongue that’s still flavored with musky traces of her _cunt_, Jesus. Her fingers snarl in his leather vest in the exact moment his braid into her hair, holding her to him as he presses kiss after kiss to her mouth, landing on her cheeks and chin as often as he does on her lips, but that’s okay; she doesn’t want a perfect, practiced, calculated kiss. She wants _Daryl_.

And she gets him. God, she does, and _finally_. She gets the panting, growling little breaths he takes between snatched, sloppy kisses; gets his big warm hands cupping her skull like it’s made of glass even as he uses his mouth on her like the rest of her absolutely _isn’t_; gets her skin scratched up by that beard so it’s sure to be flared red as sunburn by the time he’s through with her.

Except she’s hoping to God that he never _will_ be through with her.

_She’s_ never gonna be through with _him_, anyway, and she proves it by meeting his eagerness with a desperation to match, nipping at his lower lip so he groans and presses his teeth into _hers_; smoothing her hands down his heavy shoulders to grip those goddamn _arms _she’s spent hours of her life thinking about; scooting out of the uncomfortable metal folding chair and into his much more comfortable lap, hamstrings burning a little when they spread wide around his hips, because, Jesus, he’s so much _bigger_ than her, and she loves it. She loves that she can put a man twice her size on his knees for her, not because she made him, but because he _wants to be there_.

And Daryl doesn’t miss a beat, arms going around her middle to hug her to him, breaking off from her mouth only to track hot, wet kisses along her cheek and down her jaw, butting her head back with a nudge of his nose to push his tongue against her pulse and suck a bruise right over the place where her heart throbs closest to her skin like he’d swallow it whole if he could. Beth pants toward the guard tower’s roof and weaves her fingers into Daryl’s sweaty hair, grinding her hips against his hard-on and trying to find an angle that’ll hit her right in the clit.

“Beth, _fuck_.” He says her name like a curse, like a plea and a prayer, rough hands pushing under her shirt to feel up her bare skin. His tongue paints a line down her throat, and his hips twist up to meet hers, get her riding the stiff line of his dick in earnest. “M’gonna—_Christ_.”

Beth flushes hot and then cold, tingling all over from her scalp to her cunt because she knows what Daryl’s trying to say—or maybe trying _not_ to say, ’cause he’s embarrassed—and she might be a virgin, alright, but she dated a teenage boy and she knows how boys get sometimes, knows that just the right amount of friction at just the right angle can get them going off wet and messy in their pants. Daryl’s not a teenage boy, he’s closing in on _forty_, but Beth—quiet, unextraordinary Beth who’s always getting eaten up by her big sister’s shadow and always being underestimated by nearly everyone around her—is making him_ act_ like one. She’s got him desperate and trembling and just a touch away from coming all over himself, and she hasn’t even gotten her hand around him yet.

Her effect on him hits her like a slap to the face, to the _clit_, cunt slicking in her panties, and she squirms in Daryl’s lap, worming a hand between them to push her fingers down the front of her open jeans because she’s _gotta_ touch herself, she’s gotta, she’s gotta get off _right now_ or else she’s gonna _combust_—

But Daryl must’ve felt her going for herself—of course he did; they’re squeezed so close together and her wrist had to’ve bumped him in the stomach when she shoved her hand down her jeans—because he’s snatching hold of her wrist before her fingertips can so much as brush her throbbing clit, ignoring her protesting little cry and swinging her around so her back’s not to the chair anymore, and she finds out _why_ he moved a second later when she hits the floor with a short, surprised huff, when he pins the hand that she tried to use on herself above her head, cradling her skull with _his _free hand so it doesn’t crack open on impact.

Beth’s vision blurs for a second, then comes back into focus when she blinks and locks onto Daryl’s face. His ruffled hair’s falling into his wild eyes, his lips and chin are shiny with spit, and his throat’s starting to bruise from the hickeys she gave him earlier. Beth’s cunt throbs harder just from looking at him, getting so slick it’s like she wet herself, easing the way for him when he slides his hand out from beneath her head and into her pants, taking over where she let off when he swung her around and pinned her to the floor.

Beth half shouts, and the hand on her wrist slides over her mouth, muffling her cries as she thrashes beneath him, legs pinned by his weight, cunt pushing at his fumbling fingers. _Fumbling_, yes, but Daryl’s always been good with his hands, so of course_ that _would translate over to _this_, and he’s only been touching her for a few seconds before his fingers are slipping up her lips to home in on her clit. And thank God he covered her mouth, because the noise she makes when his calluses scrape across all those nerve endings could bring every walker in the county down on this prison.

His hand slides off her mouth to cradle her jaw, and he muffles her cries with sloppy kisses instead, thumb poised on the dip of her chin to drag her lips farther apart. He tangles his tongue with hers, skims his teeth across her lower lip, presses his mouth to her cheek and mumbles, “This alright?” as his fingers tease her already swollen clit into a diamond-hard nub.

A laugh catches in her throat, but it comes out sounding like a moan when Daryl replaces his fingers with the tough heel of his hand and rocks it against her clit. She wants to tell him that _alright _doesn’t really do any justice to what she’s feeling, but all she can muster is a slurred, “Uh-huh. Keep—_Jesus_—keep goin’, Daryl, _please_,” as her toes curl in her boots and her hips ride his hand, fingers twisting in his vest and squeezing so tight she just about loses all feeling in them.

Daryl gasps and swears, because she begged him or because she pushed her cunt into his hand, she doesn’t know and frankly doesn’t care, doesn’t really care about _anything_ in this moment that isn’t tied up in chasing the tingling rush that’s spread out from her clit and into her hips and thighs. Daryl squeezes her breast through her sweat-grungy shirt, and getting felt up never did much for her before, but it’s doing something for her _now_, now that every square inch of her skin feels like an extension of her clit, and she pushes into that, too, throws as much of her body at him as she can while it’s still pinned to the floor.

It’s a good thing he’s holding her down, though, because with her thrashing around like she is, she runs the risk of hurting him on accident. Almost hurts _herself_ on accident, because when Daryl skims his index finger down her slit to push inside of her with a raw squelch not unlike the sound of a bolt cutting through a walker’s eye, she nearly bites her tongue in goddamn _half_.

“_Fuck_.” Daryl changes up the angle of his hand, switching out his heel for his thumb and pushing a second finger into her alongside the first. Beth’s always known, academically, that Daryl’s got big hands, and that he’s a big guy in general, not all that tall but still powerfully built and strong enough to snap her in half if he wanted to, but knowing and feeling are two different things, and what he _feels_ is huge, one hand dwarfing her breast and the other overflowing the space between her legs, dick hot and heavy against her hip, but this man who’s twice her size and twice her age, this man who should have all the power here and probably _would_ if he were a different kind of person, shakes even harder than she does when he feels her running like a spring into his palm.

“Jesus, Beth, you’re so fuckin’ _wet_, I can’t—” He muffles a gasp against her cheek, except when Beth thinks about it—and it’s really, _really_ hard to think about it with him curling his fingers inside of her the way he is—it actually sounds like a _sob_. “I don’t fuckin’—_shit_—I dunno what the fuck to do.”

Beth’s eyes bulge in their sockets, because is he goddamn_ serious_ right now? She almost laughs again but swallows it at the last minute, not wanting Daryl to think that she’s making fun of him. She disentangles her fingers from his vest and wraps her arms around him instead, hugging him tight and pressing a hard kiss to his rough cheek. It’s not easy, forcing herself to speak past the unending whine that’s caught in her throat, but she’s gotta try. For him, she’s gotta try.

“Just keep—God, Jesus, _Daryl_—keep doin’ what you’re doin’, alright, don’t _stop_.” She manages to slide one leg out from underneath of his and crooks her knee, bracing her foot against the floor to give herself some leverage so she can fuck his fingers in earnest, and then _she_ sobs, sobs from how fucking _good_ it feels. She’s gotta _tell him_, so she does. “Feels so good, Daryl.” She kisses him again, not on the cheek but on his slack, gasping mouth, inhaling his breath like tobacco smoke. “You’re makin’ me feel so good.”

He _definitely _sobs this time, hips fucking forward, mouth fumbling at hers even as his thumb fumbles at her clit, and Beth’s never come this fast from touching herself, not even when she touched herself to thoughts about _him_, but she can feel her oncoming orgasm buzzing in her clit already, swelling close to the surface of her skin and ready to burst. She screws her eyes shut and clutches him so tight her hands cramp, thigh hugging his hip, cunt clenching, please please please God _Daryl_—

Her orgasm pounces on her like a clawed, hungry thing, like a _walker_, peeling back her skin and leaving her raw, stripped, not a person anymore but a giant exposed nerve, and she twitches like she’s in her death throes, like a walker really _did_ get her, except it’s not a dead thing that’s got its teeth against her throat. It’s _Daryl_, and he’s grunting into her neck like he’s coming, too, finger fucking her through it and keeping her pinned when her body twists like it’s trying to buck him off. It’s not, _she’s_ not, at least up until the point where it becomes _too much_ and she can’t take any more, can’t take the scrape of his thick calluses across her overstimulated clit, and she has to beg him to stop, _stop_, give her a minute.

Just one minute.

No matter what Daryl thinks to the contrary, Beth knows he’d never do anything to hurt her, that he’d never touch her when she didn’t want him to, so she knows he’s not ignoring her when it takes him a minute to pull his fingers out of her pussy. She can hardly hear herself talk over the buzzing in her ears, so Daryl’s probably going through something similar. She gives up on telling him to wait a minute and shows him instead, wrapping a shaking hand around his wrist and tugging so his fingers slip halfway out of her with a wet sucking sound. Daryl stiffens, then pulls the rest of the way out under his own power, hands retreating from her body to brace against the floor and lift him like he’s doing a pushup on top of her.

And oh, God, his _face_. Beth whines and twitches through another round of aftershocks just looking at him, at his flushed cheeks and his swollen mouth, at how dark his eyes have gotten. She’s never seen him like this before, and the knowledge that he’s only like this _at all _because of _her_ pulses through her like a second, albeit weaker, orgasm. God. _God_.

Daryl licks his lips, fingers curling. Beth’s not looking at his hands, probably couldn’t look away from his face if a walker scaled the guard tower like a gargoyle and sank its teeth into her throat for real, but she can feel them pulling at the ends of her hair, which’s come almost entirely undone from her ponytail.

Sex hair. She’s got _sex hair_. She fights to swallow a giggle, and then doesn’t have to fight at all when it turns into a gasp at the push of Daryl’s hard-on against her thigh.

Guess he didn’t come when she did, after all.

“You, uh.” God, she’s never heard his voice get that hoarse before, not even when he’s been chain smoking. He bows his head, shudders, looks at her from underneath his bangs. “Y’alright? I—”

“I want you to fuck me.” Daryl’s head snaps up, eyes wider than Beth’s ever seen them, wide enough to swallow the whole world, and he looks like she slapped him. Beth feels like_ she’s_ been slapped, cheeks stinging, mind reeling, because she didn’t really mean to say _that_, except she did. She knows she did.

She wants him to fuck her. She wants him to wrap her legs around his hips and pound her into the floor, and she wants it right the fuck _now_.

She can’t palm him through his jeans, not with the way he’s pressed flush against her, so she stretches underneath of him and gets her thigh riding his cock instead, tingling all over when he grunts and twitches and fucks forward to meet her before clenching his jaw and holding himself agonizingly still. She presses into him harder and runs her fingers down his front, nails scratching at him lightly through his shirt, thumbs sweeping across his hard nipples.

“I want you to fuck me,” she repeats, something she’s never said to anybody else before and probably never will again, and it’s not as easy or unthinking as it was the first time, but it’s still thick with intent. She runs one hand up his chest to cup his jaw, smiling when he butts his chin against her palm like an affection-starved cat. “I want it, Daryl. But only if you want it, too.”

One corner of his mouth twists up into a wry half smirk, and Beth’s not even sure what _that’s_ all about until he mumbles, “’Course I do.” He peels one hand off the floor and presses it to hers, holding it to his face and intertwining their fingers. “Swear it’s all I fuckin’ think about anymore.”

Beth was already turned on—not just _turned on_; coming down from the first orgasm she’s ever had that she didn’t give to herself, underwear ruined and feet still twitching—but knowing for certain that Daryl’s thought about this. About_ them_, at length. It tightens her nipples and licks up her cunt like a hot tongue, makes her clench around nothing. Nothing, but it could be _something_.

A whole lot of something, from the feel of it.

“Do you.” God, but it’s not easy to remember what she meant to say with him rutting his hard-on against her hip like that. She wavers, then screws her eyes shut because she can’t look at him and _feel _him at the same time and be expected to think clearly. “D’you wanna right now?”

Daryl’s hips still, and Beth’s eyes fly open, fingers clenching against his face. His lips are parted, but no sound is coming out, and Beth’s just starting to wonder if she fucked up after all when he finally says, hoarse and a little choked, “Don’t got a rubber. Don’t keep ’em on me, I never fuckin’—”

“That’s okay,” she rushes to say, and she’s cutting him off and that’s _rude_, but she wants to get this out before he can tell her how stupid she’s being. She drags her hand out from under his and combs her fingers through his hair, grinning when his eyes slit. “You don’t, um. You don’t _have_ anythin’, d’you?”

She nearly didn’t ask, because she’s almost positive that he doesn’t—this is _Daryl_, for cripes’ sake, and he’s not exactly known for bedhopping—but she’s gotta check ’cause it’s the _responsible_ thing to do, even if what she plans on doing next really isn’t.

What she can see of Daryl’s forehead through the curtain of his floppy bangs scrunches up. “The hell? Nah. Why?” Except she’s pretty sure that’s understanding dawning in his eyes, so she practically trips over herself to finish her thought. Please, please just let him give her a chance to argue her case. 

“That’s, um, good—I don’t have anythin’, either. Um, obviously. I mean, not _obviously_, but—but if both’a us are clean, that means we don’t need a condom, right?”

She’s blushing by the end of it—which is pretty ridiculous, all things considered—and she only blushes harder at the dubious scowl that slams down onto Daryl’s face.

“No, it _don’t_ mean that. What, you tryna tell me you’re on the pill? There even any’a that shit left?”

Probably not, at least none that isn’t expired, and if there _is_, Maggie’s probably hoarding it like dragon’s gold. “I mean, I’m pretty sure there’s some Plan B in inventory, and can’t you just—y’know. Pull out?”

Daryl’s mouth drops open—and Beth can understand why; she never imagined herself saying the words _pull out_ either, not in this context—and then his head drops on his neck, and there’s a sharp scraping sound next to Beth’s ear that compels her to turn and look and find that he’s digging his nails into the floor like he’s just that desperate for something to hold onto, something to ground him because she’s just driving him _that _crazy.

That’s kinda heady, actually.

“Beth,” Daryl says, and she looks away from his white knuckles and back to his face, back to his tensed jaw and flushed cheeks. “Don’t be fuckin’ stupid. Y’know that shit don’t work—”

“It actually does,” she argues—some of the time, anyway. But Daryl’s not even listening to her.

“Can’t it fuckin’—Jesus _Christ_—can’t it fuckin’ wait till I get us some goddamn rubbers?”

Yeah. Yeah, it probably could. If they were normal people living in a normal world, it _absolutely_ could—even if it’s unlikely that they would’ve _met_ in a normal world, let alone become _this_ to each other—but they aren’t. They really _don’t_ know if they’ll make it to nightfall, never mind the next morning, and Beth doesn’t wanna be sorry about losing this chance if she doesn’t take it right now.

“I don’t _want_ to.” It bursts out of her on a gasp, and her fingers tighten in his hair for a second before she forces them loose. She cups his face in both hands, makes him_ look_ at her, trying to get him to _understand_. “I don’t want to, Daryl, I _don’t_—if you don’t wanna do this at all, tell me, but if you wanna fuck me right now, then _fuck me_.”

Daryl’s groan sounds absolutely agonized, like she just slid a knife into his gut instead of telling him it was okay to fuck her raw, and his eyes squeeze shut into a pained grimace to match the noise he just made, hips twisting restlessly like he already_ is _fucking her. Beth uses her grip on his face to tug him down, and he goes willingly, lets her kiss the harsh line of his mouth until it softens, until he’s panting, until his fingers are combing through her wrecked hair and he’s saying, “Yeah. _Fuck_, alright. Alright, Beth, alright.”

The wave of heat that flushes through her just about sears her skin off her bones, pussy throbbing like a second heartbeat because, _God_, they really are doing this. She’s shaking so hard with anticipation it’s a wonder she can do much more than just lay there and twitch, but she manages to nudge him back far enough to give her the room she needs to sit up and tug her shirt over her head, hesitating for a second before removing her bra, too—which is just dumb, honestly, because his fingers were just in her pussy, and she’s positive that he’s seen her at least half naked before in admittedly much less sexually intimate contexts. She shouldn’t be feeling _shy_, is the point.

Or maybe it’s not so much shyness as it is insecurity. She’s not much to look at up top, and she’s even skinnier now than she was before the world ended, and while she doesn’t_ think_ that Daryl’s the kinda guy who’d care about that stuff, force of habit has her crossing her arms over her chest and ducking her head—

Until Daryl wraps his hands around her wrists and tugs her arms away from her breasts. “Hey,” he says quietly, gruff and gentle all at once. “Knock that shit off. We’re gonna do this, I wanna see you.”

God, seriously. How is it that she’s still blushing at this point? “Ain’t much to see.”

“Bullshit,” he retorts, scowling a little now, and he seems to hesitate for a second before moving to cup her breast and skate his callused thumb across her nipple, and, Jesus, that feels good. Now _he_ ducks his head, and he mumbles, “Got the prettiest tits I ever seen, girl.”

A lump forms in Beth’s throat, and she blinks hard because if she doesn’t, she’ll cry. He’s being so good to her that she can’t imagine why he’d ever think himself capable of the opposite.

Well, no. She _can_ imagine why. She knows from personal experience that trauma isn’t logical. It just pisses her the _hell_ off, that someone so fundamentally _decent_’s been made to believe that he’s not. That he could ever be anything else _but_ that.

She brushes a hand across his cheek, chucks him under the chin to coax him into looking at her. Smiles. “Y’wanna see if the rest’a me’s as pretty?”

His cheeks flame red through his deep tan, but he smiles, too, small but genuine. “Know it is,” he says quietly. “But alright.”

He rocks back on his heels to help her out of her boots, yanking them off and throwing them aside where they land with two successive _thuds_. Her fly’s already undone, so it’s just a matter of lifting her ass off the floor and shoving her jeans and panties down her hips, at which point Daryl takes over and pulls them the rest of the way off, and then that’s it. She’s naked as the day she was born, and she’s never felt so vulnerable and so powerful all at once.

Vulnerable, because you’re always gonna feel a little bit of that when you’re naked in front of another person no matter how well you know them. Powerful, because even though Daryl’s still fully dressed, he somehow manages to look more naked than _she_ is, stripped and wanting and _shaking_ with how badly he needs her.

He tugs her knees apart and pushes a hand up her leg, shaking even harder when his fingers brush the wetness that paints her inner thigh. Not just sweat. He made her come all over herself. He did that. Him.

His fingers are so hesitant when they comb through her pubic hair to brush her pussy lips that you wouldn’t think they’d been inside her only a few minutes ago. He shuts his eyes, takes a shuddering breath, opens his eyes again and says, “Fuck, Beth. You’re—_fuck_.”

It’s not exactly poetry, but that’s alright. She stopped wanting poetry a long time ago.

“It’s okay,” she tells him, trying to keep her voice steady for his sake even as her toes curl at the brush of his rough fingers across her oversensitive clit. She doesn’t know how she’s gonna survive him fucking her, but, God, is she practically crawling out of her skin to find out. She pushes his vest off his shoulders and halfway down his arms, tensing when _he_ tenses. One of them should probably stay at least half dressed in case there’s an emergency, but she wants to feel some of his bare skin, at least. “Is this—is this alright?”

He chews on the corner of his lower lip and casts his eyes to one side, obviously thinking it over. That’s good. She doesn’t want him to automatically agree to things that make him uncomfortable just to keep her happy. She doesn’t want anything that he didn’t want already.

It’s like she said: pressure isn’t just physical.

“Yeah.” He looks at her when he says it, when he shrugs his vest the rest of the way off. “Yeah, alright. S’fine.”

He seems to mean it, and if she asks him if he’s sure, it’ll only piss him off. So she leans back on her hands and watches him hesitate over his shirt’s buttons for a second before making quick work of those, too, baring his flat brown nipples and the smudged, faded tattoo over his heart. He hesitates another second, then whips his shirt the rest of the way off before scooting in between her legs and bearing her back against the floor.

She’s never seen the scars on his back, but she knows about them, and she’s not sure if avoiding them’s for the best, or if that’d only make him feel worse. She grips his biceps for now, nails digging in when she feels him fumbling between them to unclip his belt and undo his fly, and just about cuts through his skin down to the bone when his dick falls out of his pants to smack wetly against her stomach.

He’s so warm. Warm and slick and pulsing, just like her but also _not_, and thick enough to make her wonder if this’ll actually work, after all.

She tells herself not to be silly_._ She was made to stretch, and she’s wet enough to drown him, besides. It’s okay. It’ll be okay.

It’ll be more than okay.

More fumbling between them as he notches himself against her opening, and she twitches at the shock of feeling, thighs trembling against his hips. His free hand gropes for hers, tangling their fingers together as he presses his forehead to her cheek and breathes hotly against her throat. 

“Tell me—_fuck_—tell me if ya need me to stop, alright?”

She doubts she’ll need to, but she nods anyway, giving his hand a reassuring squeeze. “Yeah. Yeah, I will, Daryl, just—_c’mon_.”

“Fuckin’ impatient,” he grouses, but he’s laughing a little when he says it, a laugh that gets drowned out by his gasp and hers when he knocks his hips forward and slides inside her with one long, hard push.

And did she say she _gasped_ when he pushed into her? It’s more like a strangled little half scream that she quickly muffles against his shoulder, not because it hurts but because it’s such a shock, and if she thought his fingers or her own could give her an idea of what this felt like, she was so, so wrong. She feels stretched to her limit, hips spread so wide they burn, and she had _no idea_.

“_Daryl_.” Her face is still pressed up against his shoulder, and when she opens her mouth to say his name, she tastes skin and sweat. The hand not tangled up with his falls from his arm to his ass, urging him closer, _deeper_, because even though the pressure of his dick inside her is almost too much, it’s also somehow not enough. “God, Daryl—_fuck_.”

Guess she’s not much for poetry at the moment, either.

And if she’s grappling for words, then Daryl seems to’ve lost his grasp on them entirely, muffling his grunt in her hair, the hard muscles in his ass flexing under her palm as he pushes deeper still, all the way in till there’s nothing left for him to give her. She bucks underneath of him, urging him to fuck her for real, and his hips jerk in reaction, fingers squeezing her hand so hard the bones grind together.

“Jesus fuckin’ _Christ_.” Looks like he’s found his words after all, grinding them out through the clenched teeth he bares against her cheek. He jerks his hips again, not in instinctive reaction to something she did but with _intent_, and Beth’s eyes just about roll back in her head at the feel of his thick cock thrusting into her. “What the _fuck_, girl. You tryna make me lose it?”

Beth laughs, breathlessly, nails digging into his ass and the back of his hand when he fucks her hard enough to push her a few inches across the floor. Her back’s starting to hurt already, but she can hardly feel it through the heat radiating out from her cunt to sear her every nerve ending.

“Ain’t that—” She cuts herself off with a grunt on the next downstroke, toes curling, fingers flexing. Her head falls back against the floor with a dull thunk, but like the growing ache in her back, she hardly even registers what’s sure to become a bruise. “Ain’t that the point?”

He lifts up enough for her to see his face, flushed lurid red and set in a scowl. “Quit—bein’—a fuckin’—smartass.” He punctuates each staccato word with a forward push of his hips, each harder than the last till he’s fucking her quick and steady, and if he was trying to shut her up, he’s succeeding, because she can’t think past the heavy drag of his cock in her cunt and the slap of his skin on hers, can hardly even _breathe_ through her hiccupping little yelps.

His heavy hips pin her in place, his arms cage her in, and when she turns her head to roll her scalding cheek against the cool floor, the sight of his bicep flexing in time with his full-body thrusts hits her like a physical sensation, arrowing down her spine to seize her by the cunt and make it clench so hard she’s half convinced she’s about to come again without any direct stimulation to her clit.

She doesn’t come, not yet, but she _does_ squeeze him hard enough to pop, and he gasps, hips stilling, abdomen clenching. He freezes like that for a moment, and before Beth can pull herself together well enough to ask him what’s wrong, is he okay, he’s pulling out of her with a squelch and rolling over onto his back, gasping toward the ceiling, dick slapping against his stomach.

Beth scrambles to sit up, then pauses before she can reach out to touch him. She didn’t get a very good look at his dick before, and she can’t help but stare at it now. It’s shiny with her come and leaking at the tip, flushed an even deeper, angrier red than his face and chest, and she doesn’t understand. He looks desperate to come and ready to strain out of his own skin, so why did he stop?

Oh.

Maybe he stopped _because_ he was that desperate to come. Because—

“Daryl.” He shudders when she says his name, then shudders again when she leans over him to brush tender fingers down his face. His eyes are clamped shut, teeth cutting into his lower lip, and it’s like how he was right after their first, clumsy kiss, but worse. Like he’s fighting not to fuck her and hurting himself in the process.

“_Daryl_.” She frames his face in both hands, now, runs her thumb across his lower lip to free it from the clasp of his teeth. What she’s about to ask will probably only make him feel worse, but she _has_ to ask it. She can’t fix this unless she knows for certain. “Did you—did you almost come just now?”

She didn’t think he could turn any redder, but he does, making an agonized noise of frustration and flinging his forearm over his eyes.

She’ll take that as a yes.

“It’s okay,” she tells him, leaning down to kiss his cheek, his bitten-red mouth. She combs her fingers through his sweaty hair and cradles his skull as gently as she’s ever cradled Judith, supporting him the way she’s so often supported the baby’s neck. She nudges her nose against the sharp ridge of his cheekbone, speaks her reassurances into his skin. “It’s okay, Daryl. You can come, it’s okay. I—I _want _you to.”

“Don’t wanna,” he mumbles, and she pulls back far enough to look at him, but he’s still hiding his eyes from her. As for his mouth, it’s set in a deep, discontent frown. He pulls in a shuddering breath, then adds, “Not till you do.”

Beth blinks down at him. “But I…already did.”

He gives a jerky shrug. “Don’t matter. Wanted to feel you come again. Can’t do that if I shoot off in a fuckin’ minute, Christ.”

Beth’s smile is lost on him, with him hiding from her like he is, but she lets it unfurl across her face anyway. “Pretty sure it was longer’n a minute.”

He makes a disgusted noise. “Not by much.”

Beth rolls her eyes, then taps him on his nose, and _that’s_ what finally compels him to lower his arm, if only so he can glare at her. She catches his eyes before he can look away again and says, “What, were you keepin’ count?”

He huffs, and maybe it’s wishful thinking on her part, but she’d venture to say that he sounds at least a little amused. “Shut the hell up.”

Beth’s grin widens, then shrinks again, and she leans in for another kiss—one that he reciprocates this time, if only briefly. She rests her forehead against his and says, “Alright. Then just don’t come till I do.”

She can_ feel_ him frowning. “The fuck? You think it’s that easy?”

“Yeah, I do.” She sits up straight, then straddles his stomach, toes curling at the scratch of his body hair against her pussy lips. From the hiss he releases through his teeth, it’s doing something for him, too. “Don’t come till I do, or—”

She wavers, and Daryl’s eyebrows arch as he takes hold of her hips. He doesn’t have to say anything for her to hear the, _Or what?_

“Or I won’t let you come at all,” she finishes, and Daryl’s mouth drops open, hands flexing on her hips.

“The fuck?” he says again. “The hell you mean,_ let _me?”

“Means what it sounded like.” Beth lifts up and walks backwards on her knees, and Daryl’s hands follow her, clinging tight to her hips, fingers digging in hard when she grips his dick around the base and taps the spongy head against her opening. “You gonna behave yourself, Dixon?”

For a second, Daryl’s face is shocked and open and vulnerable, but then his shields slam back down in the form of a scowl, and he shoves up with his hips, cockhead skittering across her clit. “Girl, just shut your damn mouth and sit on my fuckin’ dick already.”

Hearing him talk like that hits her like an openhanded slap to the cunt, and it’s all she can do not to roll over and beg him to keep fucking her into the floor. But she _can’t _do that, because he needs it like this. He needs her to take charge and show him that he’s allowed to feel good, that he’s allowed to want her and _have her_ because she _said_ he could.

He’s not _taking something_; he’s not _stealing her_; she’s _giving herself to him_. And right now, he wants her to give him her cunt.

That works for her.

“Could’a asked a little nicer,” she says, very deliberately pushing his buttons, but before he can make good on the renewed scowl on his face and tell her to put up or shut up, she braces herself on her knees, tucks his cockhead against her cunt, and sinks into place so hard and so sudden it leaves her a little breathless.

Not just her. Him, too. He writhes around beneath her same as _she_ was writhing under _him_ earlier, panting, hips coming up so sharply it half lifts her knees off the floor. Her stomach swoops, and she leans forward to ground herself, pinning Daryl by the shoulders. And she’s stronger than most people expect her to be, yeah, but she’s under no illusions as to which of them is stronger. If Daryl wanted to buck her off, he could.

It all comes down to him _not_ wanting to.

“Shhh.” Talking is a herculean effort, but she makes that effort for him. She keeps one hand braced on his shoulder but smooths the other over his cheek, fingers combing through his hair. His eyelids flutter, and she smiles. “Shhh, it’s okay. You’re doin’ so good, Daryl. You’re bein’ so good for me.”

Jesus, she doesn’t even know where any of this is coming from, but when Daryl huffs and whines and rocks into her again, she starts to get an inkling. Because he _is_ good. He’s so, so good and he needs to hear it because he thinks he isn’t. He’s _convinced_ that he isn’t, but there’s a part of him that’s begging to be convinced of the opposite. He doesn’t think he’s any good, but he _wants_ to be.

It’s up to her to show him that he already is.

“You _are_,” she insists, because even though he didn’t argue the point, she swears he shook his head just now. And she has no idea what she’s doing—she just lost her virginity a few minutes ago, for God’s sake—but she’s squeezed a pillow between her thighs and ridden it while her fingers rode her clit, so she figures she can apply_ that _to _this_. She rocks forward on her knees and then back onto her haunches, clit buzzing in reaction to the slick slide of his cock in her pussy. With the way she’s feeling, Daryl probably won’t have to hold out for much longer, after all.

But, wait. This isn’t about her; it’s about _him_. It’s about him, so she rocks forward and back again, and _again_, trying to keep the pace as steady as she can, squeezing him tight on every downstroke and rubbing her clit hard because she wants to come, she _wants to_, but more than that, she wants to watch his face when _he_ comes. 

“You’re so—you’re so_ good_, Daryl, _ugh_.” She arches her back and almost loses her balance, has to brace one hand on his thigh while the other keeps working at her clit. Her thrusts are getting shorter now, harder, losing rhythm as she chases the feeling spooling up tight in her clit. “You’re good, you’re so good for me, _fuck_—”

Her throat squeezes shut when she comes hard and wet all over his dick, her words of praise collapsing into a whine, hips slamming down flush with his as they twitch through her orgasm. Daryl’s cock jerks inside her, fingers digging so hard into her ass she’s sure to bruise, but he doesn’t come. He lets her finish first.

It’s gotta be costing him something fierce, but he’s still being so good for her, just like she knew he’d be.

Her pulsing cunt loosens up all at once, and the rest of her muscles seem to liquify along with it, sending her toppling into his chest. She half expects him to roll them over and finish on top of her, but he doesn’t. Instead, he braces his feet against the floor, thighs jostling her ass, and fucks up into her from below, clutching her tight and panting in her ear.

Beth’s lethargic from her orgasm, languid, and she meets his desperation with sweetness, sliding her arms beneath his neck to cushion his head and planting a line of kisses through his scruff, flexing her cunt and circling her hips. She rubs her tits against his chest, muffles his whine with a kiss, and when his hips ride up to lift the both of them halfway off the floor, she knows he’s gonna come. She knows it, and in the next second, she _feels_ it.

She forgets to watch his face. She’s too overwhelmed to remember to, too caught up in the feel of his dick pulsing inside of her and shooting off a stream of hot, sticky come, too lost in the guttural sound he makes right up against her ear. Next time, though.

God, please let there be a next time.

She doesn’t get to savor the feel of him for long, though, because—

“_Shit_.”

Beth sits up so fast her head spins, looking from side to side like she expects a walker to have _actually _climbed in here while the two of them were—distracted. No walkers present themselves, and she blinks down at Daryl, getting temporarily sidetracked by the fading flush in his cheeks before finally registering the look on his face.

Panic.

“What’s wrong?” She scrambles to get her knees braced underneath of her and lift herself off his dick, and that’s when she gets it. That’s when she shudders through the unfamiliar shock of his come falling out of her to splatter across his hips and stomach.

That’s…new.

“Fuck.” Daryl pushes into a sitting position, and Beth has to lean back quick to keep their noses from colliding again. He grinds his knuckles against his eyes like he thinks he’s seeing things wrong—or _hopes_ he’s seeing things wrong—only for a guilty scowl to twist his face when he drops his hands and finds reality unchanged. “Can't believe I fuckin’—_shit_, Beth. M’sorry.”

“Hey._ Hey_. It’s fine.” She cups his face in her hands and leans her forehead against his, talking over him when he tries to protest. “It’s_ fine_, alright? You forgot. So did I. No big deal. Said I’d take some Plan B, and I will.”

“Might not work," he mumbles, and, God, it’s like he_ seeks out_ excuses to hate himself.

“Yeah," says Beth, "and we don’t know if there’s anythin’ for it to work _on_. Ain’t no use in worryin’ 'bout somethin’ that hasn’t happened yet.”

Daryl's frown deepens, but he doesn’t argue her point, and when she wraps her arms around his neck and tucks her head beneath his chin, he only hesitates a second before putting his arms around her, too. 

“So, uh. Other than that.” You wouldn’t think this’d be all that hard to say, considering, but somehow, it is. “Was it…alright?”

Daryl snorts, and Beth’s stomach's hardly had time to sink before he’s saying, “Shit. Don’t think that’s the right word for it.”

She smiles against his sweaty collarbone. More of his come trickles down the inside of her thigh, and she can’t decide if that’s gross or hot. Maybe a little of both.

“Yeah.” She seats herself more firmly on his hips, cunt nestling up against his softening cock. Her fingertips brush a hard ridge of skin—one of his scars—and then cautiously sweep across it a second time before going deliberately still. “Hey, uh. You got any Marlboros left?” 

“Nah. Ran out. Why?”

She rocks back to grin at him—well. Could be that it’s closer to a smirk. “People smoke after sex, don’t they?” 

Daryl blinks at her, then snorts again, then buries what sounds an awful lot like a_ laugh_ in her tangled hair. 

He’s happy. She’s made him _happy_.

“Next time?” she asks, trying not to sound as anxious as she feels. She can’t just assume that he’ll want to do this with her again, but—

But he says, “Yeah,” and presses a scratchy kiss to her shoulder. Holds her tight. “Next time.”


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Once again, this chapter contains non-graphic allusions to physical and sexual abuse. If you've made it this far, you should be fine, but I thought y'all'd appreciate the warning regardless. 
> 
> And YES, I've made "gently dismantling toxic masculinity" into a tag. You can thank Maj for that one.

If Daryl was entertaining some kinda vague hope that his libido would calm the fuck down once he’d gotten his hands—and other body parts—on Beth, well, he probably should’ve known better, because it’s been two whole days since he fucked her—got fucked by her?—on that guard tower floor, and he hasn’t stopped jonesing for more since.

Up till now, though, he hasn’t really had a fuck of a lotta time to dwell on it. There was no shaking the need for her, but he was able to regulate it to background noise so long as he kept busy, which ain’t all that hard a thing to do in a community this size. They all got jobs to do, Beth included. 

Granted, if they _didn’t _have jobs to do, he probably could’ve fucked her again six times over by now, so maybe that ain’t so much a blessing as it is a blue-balling curse.

Point is, things’ve slowed down a bit for him at least, and he kinda wishes they hadn’t. The overcast sky’s driven most everyone who ain’t got a practical reason to be outside indoors, though, so the good news is that he’s got the prison yard to himself. He doesn’t give a flying fuck if the looming downpour soaks him to the bone; he’d rather get hypothermia than pace up and down the claustrophobic cell block like a caged animal in rut.

_Yeah_, Daryl thinks, bringing his smoldering cigarette to his mouth and taking a long drag. So long as his smokes don’t get soggy, he couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the rain. They’re Camels, and even though he favors Marlboros, he ain’t picky. Never has been, and he’d smoke ground-up walker guts if it meant taking the edge off his frustrated desire for Beth.

He exhales hard, as much in disgust at his own damn self as to clear the smoke from his lungs. That smoke hangs in a cloud in front of his face for a few seconds before gradually dissipating, and when it does, who does he see but Beth Greene herself coming outta the cell block?

Daryl’s perched on top of one of the tables that’re scattered throughout the prison yard, kinda hunched over his cigarette like an especially mean-looking gargoyle, but he sits up straighter when he spots Beth. _Speak of the devil_, he thinks, except—nah. That don’t really suit her, does it? Hell, most folks’d probably describe her as an _angel_, even, in both looks and disposition. _He_ wouldn’t, ’cause he ain’t never been one for corny shit like that, but if he _was_…

Shit. If he was, he knows for a fucking fact that he’d call her one, too.

Goddammit.

“Hey,” she says once she’s within earshot, flipping her ponytail over her shoulder like she’s got no idea what that shit does to him. “There you are. I’ve been lookin’ for you.”

_Goddammit_, Daryl thinks (again), because it’s been cloudy all damn day and he can’t even try to pass the flush in his cheeks off as sunburn. Best he can do is duck his head so his hair hangs in his face—maybe he oughta leave it this length, after all—when he mumbles, “Yeah? Why?”

He watches Beth’s legs get closer—tries not to think about how good they felt wrapped around his naked hips while he’s at it, except of course it’s too _god_damn late for _that_ shit—but instead of stepping into the V of _his_ legs like he was expecting—hoping?—her to, she hops up onto the table beside him.

“Whaddya mean, _why_?” She nudges him lightly with her pointy little elbow, grinning when he nudges her back. “Can’t I just want to see you?”

He supposes she _can_, yeah, even if he still doesn’t quite get why she’d want to. Not that he minds. In fact, he’d venture to say that Beth going outta her way to come see him just because makes him…

Hell. It makes him _happy_.

“No accountin’ for taste, I guess,” he says, and Beth rolls her eyes and nudges him again, with her foot this time. She keeps that shit up, he’s gonna push her off this table.

Except, nah. Not really. Girl probably knows it, too.

“Where’d you get those?” she asks, nodding at the pack that’s peeking outta his shirt’s breast pocket. The cigarette in his hand’s just about shot, but he takes a drag anyway before getting around to answering Beth’s question.

“Tyreese found ’em.” Daryl ashes his cigarette, rests his hand on his knee. “Said he don’t smoke, so he gave ’em to me.”

“That was nice of him.”

“Mhm.” Yeah, Tyreese’s the kind of decent you don’t see much of these days. Out of all the newcomers, Daryl probably likes him and Sasha best.

He jolts at the tickle of sneaky fingers, and Beth responds to his startled glare with the most guileless smile he ever did see. She pulls the pack of Camels outta his pocket before he can think to stop her, flipping it over to take a look at the logo.

“You like Camels?”

Daryl fiddles with the cigarette in his hand. Shrugs. He’s tingling all over, and she barely fucking touched him. “They’re alright.”

“You like Marlboros better?”

He shrugs again and tells her what he told himself earlier. “Ain’t picky.”

“Hmmm.” She tucks the pack back into his pocket—is it just his imagination, or does her touch linger longer than it has to?—and leans her head against his shoulder. Anybody who saw them like this would probably find it innocent enough, but he still does a brief sweep with his eyes to make sure they really are alone. Just in case. “Y’know, I think Tyreese has a crush on Karen.”

Daryl turns his head to give Beth a funny look, chin grazing the top of her skull. “Who?” He’s got faces memorized, yeah, more out of ingrained survival instinct than anything else, but he ain’t really bothered to learn names, mostly because he doesn’t care.

Beth laughs softly, warm breath buffeting his collarbone. “Karen. Dark hair, sorta tall. She’s usually on fence duty.”

Oh, right. He’s pretty sure he knows who she means now. “Yeah? Why you think Tyreese likes her?” Not that he actually cares about who wants to fuck who around here, but he _does_ care about Beth, and he likes hearing her talk.

Not that he’d ever tell her so, mind you. Girl chatters at him enough as it is; if she knew how much he liked the sound of her voice, she’d never shut the hell up.

Now Beth shrugs, shoulder pushing at his for a second before relaxing back into its slump. “I mean, he always volunteers for fence duty whenever _she_ does. And he looks at her like, y’know…” She straightens up so he can see her face and gives him exaggerated calf eyes that make him snort out a quiet snicker. She swaps out the lovestruck look for a grin, and says, “Y’know, like _that_. It’s real sweet, don’t you think?”

Only one person around here he thinks is _sweet_, and he ain’t about to go telling her that, neither, because she’d never let him live it down. “Why you even care about this shit?”

He doesn’t mean for it to come out sounding grouchy, but it still kinda does, and he braces himself for the hurt that’s bound to show on Beth’s face, but she just looks thoughtful, head tipping from side to side, eyes turned toward the overcast sky.

“I guess I just…I guess I just think it’s nice, y’know? How people can still find each other and make that kind of connection even with everythin’ that’s goin’ on.” She looks at him straight on now, eyes as blue as the sky should be, open and vulnerable and so fucking _earnest_. “Don’t you think that’s beautiful?”

And Daryl. Daryl’s heart pulls a Grinch and swells three sizes before lodging in his fucking throat, blocking off anything he might’ve said even if he _knew_ what to say. _Don’t you think that’s beautiful?_ Yeah, he guesses that it probably is, but he heard the word _beautiful_ and all he could think of was the girl sitting in front of him.

_Fuck_. He blinks and looks away, eyes bouncing around like fucking basketballs until they settle on the stubby cigarette in his hand. He can think a little bit clearer now that Beth’s earnest stare isn’t drilling into his corneas and skinning him alive, and going over the rest of what she said, he doesn’t think she was just talking about Tyreese and Karen. Not anymore.

Nah. Not just.

Her fingers graze the back of his hand before weaving through his. “Daryl? You okay?”

Jesus fucking Christ. _Is he okay_? Of course she’d ask if he’s okay; all the girl ever does is take care of other people, from Lil’ Asskicker to her own dad to Daryl’s sorry ass. She even watched out for him when they fucked, taking charge when he was about to lose it and saving him from a world of embarrassment.

She’s always taking care of other people, but so is he, in his way. He took care of his mom as best he could for as long as he could, and God knows Merle would’ve wound up six feet under long before the dead started walking if not for Daryl repeatedly pulling his ass outta the proverbial fire. He ain’t no good at comforting folks or watching out for their feelings, but he knows how to protect them from the living and the dead, how to hunt for food to put on the table, how to teach them to protect_ themselves_.

Yeah. He knows how to take care of people. Likes it, even—likes feeling useful. Likes feeling _necessary_.

And he wants to take care of Beth, too. God, he wants it so bad. Anything she wants or needs from him, she’s just gotta ask and he’ll do it in a fucking heartbeat. 

He stubs his cigarette out on the table, leaving a sooty scorch mark behind, before flicking the butt onto the ground. He flips his hand over and wraps his fingers around Beth’s, cups the smooth nape of her neck in his other hand, and presses a hard kiss to her mouth.

Doesn’t even knock their noses together, so, hey. Point for him.

He can tell she wasn’t expecting it, though, because her mouth is slack with surprise—which works out well for him, actually, ’cause it makes it easier to push between her lips. And it’s like the rasp of his tongue sliding across hers shook her outta whatever startled spell she was under, because in the next second, she’s kissing him back, free hand snagging in his hair to hold him to her.

As if she needs to bother. As if there were ever any fucking chance of him _wanting _to get away.

Her cheeks and chin are warm and soft, smooth like the nape of her neck, and they feel nice against his beard. Her face’s gonna be all scratched up by the time he’s done with her, but the red should fade after a few minutes—unlike the hickeys she put on his neck, which are still there two days later. Good thing he’s usually covered in enough grime that people aren’t likely to notice, ’cause it ain’t like he could get away with wearing a fucking scarf.

He means to keep the kiss short, because even if folks don’t notice the bruises on his neck, there’s no mistaking him sticking his tongue down Beth’s throat for anything but what it is. He _means_ to, yeah, but his good intentions rarely amount to fuck-all where Beth’s concerned, and he doesn’t break the kiss until he’s startled out of it by the splash of a cold, heavy raindrop landing on his head. He leans back, turning his face away from Beth’s when she tries to chase him with a huffing little whine—fuck, goddammit—and frowns up at the sky.

Shit. He was so caught up in her, he forgot why the prison yard was empty enough for them to do this in the first fucking place.

“We should head back inside,” Beth says, and when Daryl glances at her sidelong, he finds that she’s looking up, too. A raindrop lands on her cheek and sluices down the curve of her jaw like a tear, and he wipes it away without thinking about it.

Beth’s cheek bunches up beneath his thumb when she smiles at him. “Thanks,” she says, and he drops his hand and shrugs, picking at a hangnail. “We really should get inside, though, before it starts raining for real.”

Another heavy raindrop lands on Daryl’s arm as though to underline her point, and he nods and hops off the table, Beth following suit. And it’s true that his original plan was for the oncoming downpour to hose him off like nature’s version of a cold shower, but that was before he knew he’d get a minute alone with Beth today.

He angles his body toward hers and asks, “You free?”

Beth’s cheeks turn pink—fuck, is he being that obvious?—but she nods, eyes wide and dark and glued to his face.

He ducks his head to break eye contact, fighting not to shuffle his feet like a tongue-tied preteen. “Don’t gotta watch Lil’ Asskicker or nothin’?”

“Carol’s got her,” Beth says, and he finally looks up at her when she takes his hand again. Her smile is equal parts shy and impish, and it makes him want to drop to his knees right here. “Why? You got plans for me, Mr. Dixon?”

She’s being a pain in the ass on purpose, and he should shut that shit right the fuck down, but instead he admits, heart throbbing and cock twitching, “Might.”

She squeezes his hand. “That right?”

He squeezes back. “Uh-huh.”

“Gonna tell me what they are?”

She’s smirking a little bit now. That oughta piss him off, and maybe it kinda does, sorta, but mostly he’s just trying real hard not to mirror her. “Nah.”

Her smirk breaks into a grin. “That’s alright with me. I like surprises.”

Christ, he sure as fuck hopes so. He snags his crossbow and mumbles, “C’mon,” using his grip on her hand to tug her toward the cell block. He lets her go before they get inside, but her steps never waver, and she stays close.

Not too close, though.

And, fuck, it’s not like he’s ashamed of her—what is he, a goddamn moron?—but this thing between them’s so new, and it makes him fucking _happy_, alright, he already admitted to that much, and he ain’t ready to share it with anybody else just yet—sure as fuck isn’t ready for the migraine that breaking the news to their family’s bound to give him. Rick and Michonne probably won’t care, at least, but Maggie’s sure to blow a fucking gasket, and he don’t need the folks from Woodbury looking down their noses at Beth, neither, talking about her behind her back and wondering what the hell’s wrong with her, to want to fuck around with a man like him.

He tries real damn hard to squash the persistent thought that _Beth_ might be ashamed of _him_, that she’s just a good girl looking for a cheap thrill with some dirty roughneck who would’ve been beneath her notice if the apocalypse hadn’t _forced_ her to notice him. She ain’t like that, and she’d probably be hurt as hell if he told her what he was thinking.

So, yeah. He keeps that shit to himself.

The cell block’s just as claustrophobic as he knew it would be, walls slamming down around him like a cage—because that’s what it is, ain’t it?—the second he crosses the threshold. The buzz of a whole shitload of people talking to and over each other all at once bounces off the high ceiling and pierces him between the eyes like a power drill, but he swings down the drafty corridor before it can start making him want to climb out of his skin, shoulders relaxing fractionally as the noise fades more and more the farther he walks. Beth hasn’t said anything since they got inside, and she’s walking a couple paces behind him, but he can still hear her padding along quietly and breathing even quieter, her body heat radiating along his back.

The corridor’s deserted, but he doubts they’d raise too many eyebrows even if it wasn’t. If a member of their family passed them by, they’d probably just assume that Daryl was escorting someplace, standing watch while she showers or something because he _still_ doesn’t trust the Woodbury men as far as he can throw them (not even that far, actually, ’cause most of ’em look like total fucking lightweights). As for newcomers themselves, well, they’re used to the prison’s original residents sticking close together. Of course, it’d be a different story if folks knew just _how_ close Beth and Daryl were _sticking together_.

_Shit_.

He must react somehow to what he can’t quit thinking about, maybe shakes his head as though to shake his doubts out of his brain, because Beth skips forward a few steps till she’s drawn even with him and grazes her fingers across his wrist. Doesn’t take his hand or anything, but their arms brush with every step, and that. Fuck, but that actually makes him feel a little bit better.

“Where’re we goin’?” she asks.

He turns his head to look at her and finds that she’s practically skipping along beside him, eyes glittering, teeth gleaming. Christ, but who even gave her the right to be this goddamn adorable, huh?

“Wouldn’t be a surprise if I told ya,” he says, mouth curving into a very small, very crooked smile. 

Beth affects a scandalized gasp, hand flying to her heart. “Daryl_ Dixon_, are you _teasin’_ me?”

Daryl scoffs and faces front again, but he can’t seem to force his mouth back into a frown. “Dunno what the hell you’re talkin’ about. Fuckin’ smartass.”

Beth just giggles and takes his hand, which, hell. They’re nearly there, anyway, and he’ll hear anybody who’s coming before they can catch him and Beth like this, so if she wants to hold his hand so bad, he might as well let her have her way. Less of a pain for him.

He nearly scoffs out loud again. Right. Sure. ’Cause that’s all there is to it, huh? Keep telling yourself that, asshole.

He catches Beth looking at him when he leads her into the empty cell block, but he doesn’t say anything in response to the curious smile on her face. They cleared this block out a while ago in anticipation of potential new arrivals—because they’ve got an open-door policy now, apparently—but for the time being, it sits unused, just a bunch of vacant cells and empty bunkbeds.

Right. Beds. That’s the key feature, ain’t it? Beth’s smart. She don’t need him to spell it out for her.

She deserves better than a hasty fuck on a hard floor, and in the absence of a honeymoon suite, this’s the best he has to offer.

Beth stays quiet for as long as it takes him to lead her up the stairs to the catwalk and into the cell farthest from the entrance to the corridor. He lets go of her hand once they cross the threshold, and she wanders farther in on her own, looking around for a minute—he doesn’t fucking know why; once you’ve seen one cell, you’ve seen ’em all—before sitting down on the lower bunk and patting the mattress like she’s trying to test its firmness.

Then she leans back on her hands. Crosses her legs. Smiles at him in a way that makes his skin prickle like he’s recovering from one bad mother of a sunburn.

“Now, what’d you bring me all the way out here for, Mr. Dixon?”

Somehow, impossibly, Daryl’s blush deepens. Christ, does she really gotta make it sound so damn _suggestive_? Never fucking mind that he brought her here for the exact reasons her tone is hinting at, alright, that’s beside the goddamn point.

He makes himself shrug real casual like. Runs his thumb over his crossbow’s strap and thinks about running it over Beth’s pink lower lip instead. “Maybe I jus’ figured you could use the exercise.”

Beth’s eyebrows arch. “_Excuse_ me?”

It ain’t easy to maintain a straight face, but he manages. “Y’heard me. You’re lookin’ real noodly there, Greene.” He flicks his fingers at her arms to illustrate his (bullshit) point.

“Um, I’m lookin’ no such thing, Dixon.” She flexes to prove_ her_ point, and Daryl shouldn’t’ve teased her in the first fucking place, actually, because all those hard, tensed muscles are doing a damn good job of scrambling his brains. “See?”

What was she saying, again? “Uh-huh,” he manages, and he could chalk up the rasp in his voice to the cigarette he just smoked, but going by Beth’s knowing smirk, she wouldn’t buy a damn word of it.

“Wipe that goddamn look off your face,” he grumbles, but Beth just snickers, pleased as fucking punch. Daryl grumbles some more and sets his crossbow down in the corner, then closes the distance between them and hovers in front of her a second before realizing that that puts his fucking _crotch_ on level with her face.

Flushing beet red for the third fucking time since he walked in here, he drops to his knees, not even paying no mind to the floor’s cold, hard bite, because Beth just spread _her_ knees to accommodate him, no hesitance about it.

He sure as fuck doesn’t waste no time taking her up on that particular invitation.

She tugs on his vest to urge him closer, but he’s already way the fuck ahead of her, shuffling forward till his nose bumps her cheek and her thighs close around his waist. His fingers snag in her tank top, and he turns his head to pick up where they left off in the prison yard, but she leans back before he can take her mouth, smiling so bright he almost forgets to be pissed off about what she says next.

“Y’know, Daryl, you’re a real sweet guy.”

Yeah. _Almost_. “Ain’t fuckin’ _sweet_.”

Beth rolls her eyes, but she’s still smiling when she does it. “You don’t gotta make it sound like I just _insulted _you, jeez.”

Daryl shifts his weight, uncomfortable—and not just because his knees are starting to ache. And that’s the thing, though. Where he comes from, calling a man sweet _is_ an insult. Men ain’t supposed to be sweet, or God forbid, _soft_. Men get shit done and keep their bitches in line. _Women_ are the sweet ones.

His fingers clench in Beth’s shirt, knuckles stinging with the sense memory of long-healed scabs.

Men do the dirty work.

Beth cups his face in one cool, gentle hand. Her palm’s mostly smooth, soft, but her fingers are callused. Tough. “Daryl?”

Christ, he has _got_ to stop spacing out like this. His head’s an ugly place to be, so why the fuck would he wanna linger in it? He tips his forehead against Beth’s shoulder so she can’t see whatever’s on his face, mumbles, “Yeah?”

She pushes her hand into his hair and runs her fingernails across his scalp, making him tingle all the way down to the base of his spine. “You brought me here because you wanted me to be comfortable, right? Where I come from, that’s somethin’ a _sweet _man would do.”

_Where she comes from_. It’s an exact echo of what he was just thinking, to the point where the superstitious part of him that’s always believed in shit like chupacabras can’t help but wonder if she’s somehow reading his mind.

Christ, he hopes not. Like he said, shit ain’t pretty, and he wouldn’t wish it on anybody, least of all Beth.

Beth scratches the base of his neck, and a rumbling groan catches in his throat. Fuck. It’s real goddamn hard to concentrate when she does that, which is probably _why_ she did it. “If I was fuckin’ _sweet_, I would’a brought you here the first damn time.”

“I’m the one who didn’t wanna wait,” she reminds him, as if _he’d_ been some kinda paragon of restrain, as if he hadn’t jumped at the chance to get in her pussy the second she gave him the go-ahead. She presses a kiss to his temple, so he can feel it when she smiles. “And you just proved my point.”

Jesus Christ. This girl. _This fucking girl_.

He rocks back on his haunches to scowl at her, of half a mind to shut her smart mouth up by stifling it with his, but she beats him to it before he can try, and he ain’t even mad about it.

Her lips and tongue taste kinda bitter, and that throws him off for a second, ’cause he’s used to Beth tasting sweet no matter what she just ate or how long it’s been since she last brushed her teeth. Except, fucking _duh_, she tastes like this because of earlier, ’cause he went and kissed her with tobacco on his breath. She tasted like this during their short-lived first kiss too, on account of he’d shotgunned that Marlboro with her, but he’d still caught a hint of sweetness underneath it all, right before he panicked and pulled out of it, and he catches it again now. It’s just a matter of going deep enough.

And seeing as he’s just about lodged his tongue halfway down her throat, it ain’t no wonder that the sweet’s quick to overwhelm the bitter.

The noises she makes for him are sweet, too, and she keeps humming low in her throat like _he’s_ the one who tastes good. He knows for a fact that he doesn’t, between the tobacco and the squirrel he ate for lunch, but Beth either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, slicking her tongue between his teeth and scooting forward till her ass’s hanging off the edge of the bunk, cunt pressed snug to his abdomen. He rears up so it’s his dick she’s squirming against instead, and she starts moving with intent when she feels how hard he is for her already, cupping his face and then his throat in both hands and delving deeper into his mouth like he’s a last meal.

Fuck. _Fuck._ She keeps this shit up, he’s gonna be a puddle on the goddamn floor, won’t be able to do a damn thing except lie there and take it. And for all that he’d give his left nut to see her riding him again, using his dick like a toy to chase her own orgasm, that ain’t what he brought her here to do.

So he takes her face in his hands and pries her off of him, dick twitching in response to her frustrated little whine as much as the slow grind of her hips. She tries to pull him into another kiss, but he moves his hands to her arms and pushes her back till her head and shoulders are pressed against the wall. She looks like she’s got a goddamn fever, cheeks flushed, eyes glittering, and when she runs her tongue over her swollen lower lip, it’s all he can do not to give in to whatever the fuck she wants.

He doesn’t, though. He doesn’t. Either he’s got more willpower when it comes to her than he initially thought, or he’s just that eager to try what he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about since he licked the taste of her pussy off her fingers.

“Just—sit the fuck still.” He squeezes her arms to drive the order home before cautiously letting go of her, and when she doesn’t immediately jump on him—which, shit, is actually kinda disappointing—he sits back on his heels and tugs off her boots before going for her fly.

His fingers are shaking like crazy, but he gets her button undone and her zip pulled down, and stops to squeeze her cunt through her jeans, making her breath catch, before hooking his fingers in her waistband and tugging till the mattress blocks his progress.

“Lift up,” he tells her, and she does, so compliant, so trusting, that the lump that forms in his throat temporarily distracts him from the punch of his cock against his zipper—which is, incidentally, still sealed up tight.

He goes for his own pants as soon as he gets Beth’s jeans and panties off, just because his zipper’s teeth are starting to dig into some sensitive shit. He doesn’t pull himself out of his shorts just yet, though—nah, his focus is all on Beth and dragging her to the very edge of the mattress, palming her knees and spreading her long pretty legs apart till a muscle in her thigh jumps.

He didn’t really stop to look at her the last time, was too busy trying not to come from the _feel _of her, so he makes up for that oversight now, tucking his hand under one knee and urging her to spread herself even wider by bracing a foot on the mattress. Her shirt rides up, abdominal muscles flickering from the stretch, and Daryl doesn’t even fight the impulse to lean in and suck a patch of salty skin into his mouth, tongue rasping through the trail of coarse hair that starts below her belly button and flares into her bush.

She combs her fingers through his hair, hands stuttering when he runs his tongue across the mound of fat that pads her pubic bone. He hasn’t licked her pussy yet, not really, but it’s just like when he rolled his face against her back in the guard tower, the smell of her so strong in his nose it’s practically a taste, making his nostrils flare and his mouth water.

“Daryl?” He hums absently and rubs his cheek against her, and her fingers tighten in his hair. “What’re you—what’re you doin’?”

Daryl rocks back on his heels again to fix her with a confused scowl. “S’look like I’m doin’?” he rasps, just annoyed enough to forget to be embarrassed. “Gonna eat your pussy.”

Beth’s eyes go wide, fingers twitching against the curve of his skull. The smell of her pussy’s still thick in his nostrils, and he’d really like to get back to business, but, shit, he’s not an animal, even if he acts like one sometimes. He ain’t gonna do nothing to her till he’s goddamn sure she wants it.

“You don’t, um.” Her tongue flicks out to wet her lips, which just makes him think of sticking _his_ tongue up her cunt. “You don’t have to.”

Daryl stares at her, incredulous and more than a little pissed off. He fucking _sniffed her crotch_ within a week of kissing her, sucked her come off her fingers like she was hand feeding him nectar, and she still doesn’t get that he wants to eat her out like his life depends on it?

“Know I don’t fuckin’ _have to_.” He squeezes her hips and leans his head against her upraised knee, glaring at her from under his greasy bangs. “Wouldn’t offer to do it if I didn’t wanna.” The lump in his throat tries to rise again, but he swallows that shit down. “D’you, uh. Want me to?”

Beth starts nodding before he’s even gotten that last sentence all the way out, then stops and blushes like she’s embarrassed by her own eagerness. Daryl wants to tell her that she don’t got nothing to be embarrassed about, that she can’t be half as eager for him to eat her out as he is to do it, but he’d probably fuck up somehow if he tried. Better to just show her.

He sits up, sliding one hand between her legs to comb her pubes outta the way so he can get a good unobstructed look at her pussy. She’s as pretty as he remembers her being from the brief glimpses he got of her last time, ragged inner lips flushed and pouty with blood, clit starting to pop out from under its hood. Those sticky lips clench when he brushes his fingers over them, then part like butter under a hot knife when he pushes two into her up to the knuckle.

Beth grunts deep in her throat, toes curling against his shoulder, fingers snarling in his hair. He tightens his hold on her hip when she sways like she’s about to topple over, then pulls his fingers halfway out of her and leans down to lick his own knuckles, following the taste of her pussy to its source till his tongue bumps her clit.

Jesus goddamn _Christ_.

Beth jumps under his mouth like he just pressed the live end of a wire to her skin, thigh bumping the side of his head, nails cutting into his scalp. That last one actually kinda stings, but Daryl can’t be bothered to give a single flying fuck about it, not with the taste of her pussy seeping into his mouth, and sure as shit not with her clit throbbing like a heart against his tongue.

Merle didn’t know the meaning of _too much information_, and to hear him tell it, there wasn’t a day that went by where he wasn’t drowning in pussy. He’d always liked the taste and feel of a woman’s cunt, was always telling Daryl that it was just like sticking your tongue up a ripe peach, but he’d never go down on a woman unless she returned the favor in kind, and if he were here, he’d be proud of Daryl for nailing such a sweet young thing, but he’d also be giving him hell for not even trying to get Beth’s mouth on his dick.

_Shit, boy. What kinda man don’t want his dick sucked? She got a real pretty mouth, too. Christ, what a goddamn waste. _

Daryl groans and pushes his face deeper into Beth’s hot cunt, smearing her come all over his beard like the smell and feel and taste of her’s enough to drown out his personal ghosts, and maybe it is. He curls his fingers like he’s beckoning and latches onto her clit, sucking it the way he oughta want her to suck on his dick.

And, fuck. It’s not that he _doesn’t_ want that, exactly—just thinking about the tight flex of her throat’s enough to make his stomach clench and his dick throb—but it’s also what Merle, what his _dad_ would want for him, and he’d sooner call this whole thing off and never touch Beth again than give either of them the satisfaction.

He’s not gonna use her like that. He goddamn _won’t_.

“Daryl?” Beth sounds like she’s been running for miles and miles, fingers combing restlessly through his hair, and it’s that anxious tugging on his scalp that makes him realize his tongue’s gone still against her ’cause he was too caught up in an internal fucking spiral to pay attention to her like he goddamn _ought _to be doing. “I—I meant what I said earlier, alright? You really don’t—”

Nah. Fuck that noise.

He shakes his head and dives back in, pushing his tongue against her clit and sucking on it like he intends to suck her guts and heart and brains out through her cunt, and she cuts herself off with another one of those deep guttural grunts, squirming against his face and tugging on his hair, shoving her hips so hard against his jaw it’s bound to be sore when he’s through with her.

Like he gives a shit.

He pulls his fingers out of her with a squelch and holds onto her hips with both hands to keep her still, because he can live with a sore jaw but someone’s bound to ask how in the hell he got a black eye, and he really doesn’t wanna lie and say that he accidentally hit himself in the face with his crossbow. Shit’s embarrassing as fuck.

He replaces his fingers with his tongue, anyway, letting off her clit for a minute to dive between her lips instead, sucking her come into his mouth and down his throat like that could somehow quench his unending thirst of her, even though he damn well knows by now that nothing ever could. Her nails bite into his scalp when he pulls back to breathe, to pant against her bruised, sticky lips, to eye the strands of come and saliva that’re hanging off of her in thick, glistening ropes before going back in to slobber all over her some more.

He doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing, ain’t never done this shit before in his entire goddamn life, but he pays attention, alright, and he’s got a fast learning curve, and Beth groans like she’s dying every time he sucks on her clit like it’s a goddamn lollipop, so he keeps that up, breaking off every few seconds to tease her with barely there kitten licks, getting her all wound up till the shitty mattress’s squealing under her bouncing hips, till she’s practically pulling his goddamn hair out, till she’s all ripe and ready for his fucking _dick_—

“_Fuck_, Daryl, Jesus—c’mon, I wanna—_ugh_, _God_—”

Beth keeps egging him on till she can’t no more, thigh slamming into the side of his head, and he knows he just might walk away from this with a black eye, after all, but he’s too busy working her through her orgasm to care, not letting up till she tugs on his shoulders and knocks her heel against his spine, telling him without words that it’s too much, she needs a goddamn break.

He pulls off of her with a slurp, licking her tacky come off his lips and beard, and she cups his face in her hands and slides her fingers through the mess she made, pushing her thumb into his unresisting mouth. He suckles on it the way he was suckling at her clit, shutting his eyes because _he _can’t take the way she’s looking at him right now, like he just hung the fucking stars.

It’s too much. It's just too fucking much.

Beth pulls her thumb out of his mouth, dragging it across his lower lip and pressing it against the dip of his chin, and then it’s her _tongue_ that’s inside of him, licking up the taste of her own come. Daryl groans and leans into it for a second, but he breaks the kiss before he can wind up on his back again.

Not that he _minds_ being underneath of her, hell no. But it’s like he said—it just ain’t what he brought her here for. 

Christ, please let her be into what he brought her here for.

“Hold up,” he says, and practically tears off his vest and shirt before climbing onto the bunk with her, pushing his pants down his hips as she scrambles toward the head of the bed to make room, long bare legs sprawling. She goes to lay on her back, but he wraps a hand around her arm and urges her over onto her stomach instead. She doesn’t stop him, but the look she throws over her shoulder is a little startled, and he hesitates, face flushing, stomach twisting.

_Fuck_. What the fuck was he even thinking? A nice girl like Beth wouldn’t want it like this—_he_ shouldn’t want it like this, taking her on her hands and knees like a dog, using her the way Merle and their dad would use women, like they were nothing more than two wet holes and a pair of tits.

’Course, a nice girl like Beth probably shouldn’t want it any which way with a man like him, so maybe he shouldn’t put too much stock in what either of them are _supposed _to want.

Still, he should’ve fucking asked first, at the very goddamn least.

“Can I, uh.” His skin flushes impossibly hotter, and not just because it turns him on to see the long, lean length of her stretched out on her stomach like this, tight ass in the air, legs parted just enough for him to catch a flash of dark pink. She can probably feel his hand trembling against her arm. “Can I fuck you like this?”

Her pink cheeks flush pinker, but her surprise doesn’t last, and before he can backtrack and apologize for even thinking up this shit in the first place, she nods and says, “’Course you can. You, um.” She smiles a little shyly. “You got a rubber this time?”

As a matter of fact.

“Uh-huh,” he says, digging the condom out of his back pocket and tearing open the wrapper, careful not to destroy the rubber itself because he might’ve snuck an entire box of the things outta inventory, but that don’t mean they still aren’t a finite resource.

Beth watches him put it on, eyes wide and avid like she’s watching her favorite movie and not something as mundane as a guy rolling a rubber onto his dick. ’Course, he doubts she’s ever seen somebody do it before, at least not in person—did she watch porn? She don’t seem like the type, but what the fuck does he know?—so he guesses he can’t blame her. Only he still kinda does, because shit’s embarrassing and gives him something like stage fright, so it’s a goddamn relief when she turns back around and pushes up onto her hands and knees, legs spreading into a wide inverted V, pussy lips gaping open and waiting for his dick.

Daryl thinks of his come dripping down those lips, thick and white and _dangerous_, and he shudders from head to toe, at once turned on and sickened with himself. God fucking knows he won’t be getting much in the way of sleep till Beth’s next period.

But, yeah, alright. She’s waiting for him, so he’d best get his shit together. And he does, as much as he _ever _does. Wraps a hand around the base of his shaft, ostensibly to line himself up but also maybe kinda sorta as a makeshift cock ring, like that’d be enough to keep him from going off early. He doubts it’d actually do him any good if it came down to that, but he’s just desperate enough to try.

He shuffles forward on his knees, jeans twisting around his thighs, head kinda bowed so he doesn’t bash it on the underside of the top bunk and fuck up the mood beyond all repair (and, Jesus, he does_ not_ wanna explain that particular concussion to _Hershel_). He keeps one hand locked almost too tight around his dick, but he smooths the other down her back, fingernails catching in the top she didn’t bother to shed, before grabbing her ass cheek and dragging it aside to more fully expose her cunt.

Her lips clench, and the muscles in the backs of her thighs flex. She rubs the side of her foot against his calf and tosses him a look over her shoulder, eyes dark, smile lopsided.

“You waitin’ on an engraved invitation or what?”

Irritation lashes Daryl like a whip, but somehow, all it really does is turn him on even more. That’s fucked up, right? It’s gotta be fucked up. “You’d best watch your mouth.”

Beth’s smile widens to show teeth. “Or what?” she drawls, sweet as syrup, and Daryl—

Daryl doesn’t stop to think about what he does next, because if he _did_, he wouldn’t do it at all. He just lets go of her ass, winds back his hand, and smacks her on the cunt. On the clit.

Beth grunts and rocks forward on her hands and knees, head dropping on her neck, and Daryl flexes his stinging fingers, horror and disgust flushing through him like frostbite, erection starting to flag against his cupped palm because—fuck. _Fuck_.

He just—

He just fucking _hit her_.

_Not hard_, he tells himself, heart knocking like a fist against his ribcage. Not hard, and other people probably do kinky shit like this all the time, but the fact is that he raised a hand to her, which makes him no better than his deadbeat dad. He can hear the old bastard laughing at him in his head, that tobacco-hardened rasp that always ended in a cough, saying, _I told you so, boy, this shit’s in the blood_, except—

Except then Beth rocks _back _on her knees, pushing her ass against the flat of his pelvis and smearing the slick dripping off her cunt all over his thigh, and she says, “_God_, Daryl, do that again. C’mon, do it again, _please_.”

And just like that, his sagging dick goes hot and stiff with a surge of blood, filling out so quick it leaves him a little dizzy, and he stares down at this girl, _this fucking girl_, in a kind of awe, thrown for a fucking loop because she’s taken something that scares the piss outta him and turned it into, what? A way of making her feel good?

And. The thing is. If it makes Beth feel good, then it can’t actually be_ bad_, can it? If she likes it, and he takes it easy on her—if he’s not actually hurting her, then—

Then, fuck, what choice does he have but to give her exactly what she wants?

“Thought a girl like you’d want it sweet,” he marvels, sort of an admonishment but not really, and he gives her what she begged for, anyway, another slap to the clit that makes her squeal, plugging his fingers inside of her and curling them in a way that makes her thrash. “Jus’ full’a surprises, ain’t ya?”

She collapses onto her forearms, rolls her face against the flat pillow and looks up at him out of one eye. Her cunt squeezes his fingers so tight she near about snaps the damn things off, and she asks, “You like surprises, Mr. Dixon?”

He probably shouldn’t like that _Mr. Dixon_ shit as much as he does, that’s for damn sure.

“Might,” he rasps, which is sort of bullshit and sort of not. He never did before, anyway.

Never liked a lot of things before Beth gave him a whole new appreciation for them.

Beth smiles fiercely and fucks herself back on his fingers, and, yeah. As fun as it’d be to spank her cunt till it turned red—and, _fuck_, pin in that—he’s back to being as hard as he was when he got his first proper taste of her pussy, and if he doesn’t get in her _right the fuck now,_ he might suffer actual brain damage.

So he doesn’t waste another second. He angles his dick, presses the head against Beth’s soft opening, and fucks inside of her with one slow, hard push.

Distantly, he hears Beth groan, feels her rock back against him so her ass slaps his balls—but only distantly, because his ears are buzzing, every inch of his body tingling like he just licked a battery, and he hunches over from the shock of it, holding on to Beth’s hips for dear fucking life. You’d think he would’ve been at least a little bit prepared for how hot she is, how tight, but, nah. Two days might as well be two centuries for how very _un_prepared he actually is.

And Beth—Beth’s rocking up and down on his dick, these aborted little fucks because she can’t get proper leverage with him holding her as tight as he is. He grunts, straightening up as much as he can and holding her even tighter so all she can do is squirm.

“You best settle the fuck down,” he croaks, actually pretty proud of himself for managing to string a handful of words into an actual sentence with her clinging to his dick like she is.

He sees the muscles in her ass clench, _feels _the muscles in her cunt clench, and his vision actually blurs so fucking bad he barely catches the look Beth throws him over her shoulder.

“What, you the boss of me now?”

Only if she wants him to be. He swallows tightly, fingers dancing against her hips. “You got a problem with that?”

Her lips twitch. “Nah.”

Well, thank fucking God for that.

And, alright. She wants him to take charge, he can do that.

He lets go of her hips only to take her by the arms, pulling them out from under her and pinning her wrists to the small of her back so he’s all that’s holding her up. She gasps against the pillow, cunt clenching reflexively around him, and Daryl gets punched in the gut by another sick twist of uncertainty, terrified that he fucked up, that this is too much like holding her down and taking her against her will, just like his dad would want—

But then Beth grunts in that way she does when he makes her feel good, and he might’ve pulled her arms out from under her, but her knees are still braced against the cot, and she uses that leverage to rock forward and then fuck herself back on his dick, squeezing him tight the whole way down.

Daryl doesn’t shoot off right then, but it’s a close fucking call.

What he does do is start fucking her properly, hard enough to make the thin mattress bounce beneath them, hands locked tight but not _too_ tight around her wrists. Her tank top rides up to expose the sweat-slicked small of her back, and he rakes his eyes over that smooth little dip and down to the furrowed muscles of her rippling ass before leaning back a bit to get a better look at his dick jacking in and out of her cunt, the latex condom wet and gleaming with her come.

“_Fuck_.” His hands flex around her wrist, hips working harder, so hard he can feel it all the way down to his aching knees. “You like it like this, don’t’cha? ’Bout to come all over my dick an’ I ain’t even touched your clit yet.”

Beth shakes her head, frantic, fingers curling against her palms. “No, I—I still need you to touch me, Daryl, c’mon, _please_.” She squeezes him tight on the _please_, catching him on his next downstroke and just about choking the feeling out of his dick.

_Christ_. “Nah,” he manages, slowing down his thrusts so he has room to think past the stranglehold she’s got on his cock. “Don’t—_fuck_—don’t think I’m gonna just yet.”

Beth fucking _whines_, legs thrashing underneath of them, and, fuck, where the fuck did this even come from, anyway? Same place as Beth telling him he couldn’t nut till she did, he supposes, and, Jesus, he thinks he gets why she did it, because putting her orgasm under his control like this, not letting her get off till he fucking_ says_ she can, is mind-numbingly _hot_.

He lets go of her wrists, and she scrambles to brace one hand against the mattress and slide the other between her legs, but he grabs her again before she can get there, pinning her arms to either side of her head and using his weight to bear her flat against the mattress, running himself flush along the firm lean length of her. His thrusts are shorter like this, shallower, but he makes up for it with speed, pumping like a jackrabbit to chase the heat that’s coiling in his gut, face buried in Beth’s neck, teeth and tongue pressed against her galloping pulse.

“Uh-uh,” he says, orgasm rising faster in response to the sounds she’s making, grunts and squeals punching out of her throat in time with his thrusts. Fuck, but he thinks this damn mattress just might collapse out from underneath of them, and he doesn’t even know if he’d stop fucking her if it did. “Keep ya damn hands to yourself.”

Her cunt seizes up around him, fingers digging into the pillow. He can feel her legs shift against his as she bends them at the knees, feet pointing toward the top bunk.

“_C’mon,_ Daryl, come on, I wanna come, c’mon c’mon c’mon—”

She’s a goddamn spoiled _brat_, but he still gives her what she wants because it’s what _he_ wants, letting go of her wrist to shove his hand between the squealing mattress and her hard stomach, fumbling for her clit and sending her into a grunting, thrashing orgasm that inevitably yanks_ his _orgasm out of him by the heels, wringing him fucking dry as his hips jack down against hers one last time before going still.

He rolls over onto his back before he can go boneless and crush her with his weight, practically flopping off the mattress while he’s at it and only saving himself from a cracked skull at the last second by grabbing onto the side of the bunk. He cuts a glance toward Beth to make sure she didn’t see that—her face’s still buried down to the nose in the pillow, so probably not—then strips off the condom and flings it onto the floor before carefully leaning over to go digging for his lighter and smokes.

Beth stirs when he inhales his first lungful of smoke, bracing her hands against the mattress and easing into a sitting position. Her hair’s come half undone from her ponytail, and her skin’s still flushed, nipples standing out hard through her shirt and bra. She eyes the cigarette in Daryl’s mouth, then starts to grin.

Holds out her hand and wriggles her fingers imperiously.

Daryl snorts even as his lingering anxiety begins to dissipate along with the cloud of smoke he just exhaled. If she’s smiling at him and tryna bully him into sharing his cigarette with her, then she must be alright. He didn’t push her too far.

Didn’t push himself too far either, somehow.

And you know what? Girl wanted to smoke after sex, and far fucking be it from him not to give her whatever she wants whenever she wants it. So he forks the Camel over, and only smirks a little bit when she inhales too quickly and hunches in on herself to cough up what sounds like half a damn lung.

“Guess I still haven’t gotten the hang of it,” she rasps, eyes watering, not fighting him when he plucks the cigarette outta her hand and brings it back to his mouth. _Her _mouth hikes up. “Think I like Marlboros better, though.”

He chews on the filter. Looks her up and down. “That right?”

Beth lies back down in the crook of his arm, and he wraps his hand around her hip, thumb stroking warm, sweaty skin. She places her hand over his heart, and what just happened notwithstanding, he damn well knows exactly who owns who here.

Good thing he likes it that way.

“Yeah,” she says, and nips at his earlobe. “That’s right.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter will see a return to our regularly scheduled femdom, but I wanted Daryl to understand that his taking charge and even being a little rough in bed does not equate to abuse. Also, uhhh, I really wanted to write about them doing it in those positions, okay, yes, I'm thirsty and shallow.


End file.
